As far as great comedies go, we really don’t give enough credit to Neighbors. The 2014 collaboration from Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg was hilarious! After Zac Efron reminisced about how memorable Dave Franco’s Robert De Niro impression was, Rogen added his own recollection of shooting the funny frat party sequence.
Amidst Neighbors recently turning ten years old in May, Zac Efron spoke about sharing the scene with Dave Franco where the Delta Psi Beta brothers hold a Robert De Niro party. While The Greatest Showman star remembers “winging” his impression of the Taxi Driver actor, he was shocked by how well Franco nailed the Meet The Parents character. Now, Seth Rogen is weighing in on filming the Neighbors scene. In his words:
I actually remember pretty specifically that Dave Franco is in that scene and is really doing like a De Niro face and I remember the scene took hours and hours to shoot. And, I think we shot our side – like often you shoot one side and then the other side in the scene, and I think we shot our side first and he was doing the [face] off camera the whole time and then by the time we got to his side, it’s like the muscles in his face literally were like exhausted to the point that he couldn’t like keep up the Robert De Niro face [and] we’d have to stop. But yeah, that’s mostly what I remember with that scene.
In an interview with Etalk, Rogen couldn’t stop laughing as he remembered Dave Franco’s Robert De Niro impression on the set of Neighbors.
As he shared, the production shot the angle of the scene where Rogen and Rose Byrne’s husband and wife characters were speaking to the loud frat bros next door. By the time the camera moved to shoot Efron and Franco, the Now You See Me actor’s face was “exhausted” from holding the expression. Check out the scene itself:
The new tidbit about the making of Neighbors makes it even more impressive! Zac Efron initially spoke about making the 2014 comedy while rewatching iconic scenes from his career thus far for Vanity Fair. Here’s what he said about filming the scene:
He literally looks like him. He looks like De Niro. So I’m here like upfront sucking [at] doing ‘Taxi’ De Niro. And then he comes out, and it’s like says ‘Yeah, you, Focker. I’m talking to you.’ I was like, ‘Did you practice this?’ It was so funny. I was like, ‘What the fuck? Dave’s killing this.’
It’s such a great scene, especially because of how chaotic the frat party gets as Rogen’s new father gets annoyed with the college kids.
Neighbors was so good that a sequel came out two years later called Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising, which brought Chloë Grace Moretz’s Shelby and her sorority sisters into the neighborhood. Rogen shared a crazy idea for a third Neighbors movie back in 2016, but it feels unlikely another flick would be made.
Thank goodness both Efron and Rogen have projects on the 2024 movie schedule to promote so close together that allowed for these Neighbors stories to pop up. Zac Efron has had a top Netflix movie for three weeks with A Family Affair, and Seth Rogen created and stars in Sausage Party: Foodtopia. The new series is now streaming for those with an Amazon Prime subscription. You can also watch CinemaBlend’s own interview with Rogen, where Kristen Wiig and Sam Richardson talked about recording food orgy scenes.
