Swingers +10 years

Chris Jones, writer extraordinaire, on Vince Vaughn and Jon Favreau:

"We're like the Sunshine Boys," Favreau says. "Did you ever see that? He's Walter Matthau."

Favreau looks at Vaughn. "Or maybe you're George Burns."

"Jon's my favorite writer," Vaughn says. "Even collaborating now with Couples Retreat, my job is just to help shape it. He's really the guy writing it."

"But Vince was smart enough to say, Hey, I'm at this point in my career, instead of just fielding gigs, let me generate my own material. It was about a year and a half ago, after the Spike Awards--"

"The Mantlers," Vaughn says.

"We won this award--"

"The Golden Mantlers."

"We were inducted into the Guys Hall of Fame. So we went to the Dresden of all places, where we hadn't been in years, and Vince laid out what he was going to do with Wild West and some of the ideas he wanted to pursue. He mentioned Couples Retreat. And I have a perspective on that, being married with three kids . . . "

"Are you done having kids?" Vaughn asks.

"Yeah, I'm done."

"You're not going to pull the goalie ever again?"

"No. Joy says, 'It's wife number two if you want more kids.' "

"Then you would have to move to, like, some Islamic country where you could have another wife," Vaughn says.

"Or nowhere. I could do the Hollywood thing, just hit reset."

"Or you could move into Warren Jeffs territory."

"I could set up a compound?"

"Yeah," Vaughn says, "a compound. That was so disturbing. You see all these little girls who look like extras from Little House on the Prairie. It's like Half Pint's been putting out for everybody. . . . "

"Polygamy seems appealing," Favreau says, "but then I've been watching that show Big Love, and you realize it's the same headaches."

"It's triple the headaches. Triple the nagging. Triple the question, What are you thinking?"

"Yeah, one marriage is enough," Favreau says.

"You have to pick out three sets of blinds."

"Anyway," Favreau says, "I'm in that place, coming from that perspective now. I couldn't write something like Swingers today, because I'm so far out of that."

"No, you have a good imagination," Vaughn says.

"No, Swingers, a lot of that stuff was stuff you'd said or stuff I'd heard about, and it gives you a personal take on the stuff. When I write, I need that."

"It blows my mind, seeing where Favs has gone with his career," Vaughn says. "I mean, Iron Man? Are you kidding? That's incredible to me, thinking about us not that long ago, sitting at the diner, trying to figure out how to get the money to make Swingers."

"Now that we both can make movies more easily," Favreau says, "the hard part is, What movies do I want to make? What means something to me? The challenges have changed. It's a lot different for us now. It's like being a short-order cook instead of being a chef, when you could pay such close attention to every part of the process. How do you bring that same quality when people are lined up around the block waiting for you to serve something up?"