Jonah Hill, Miles Teller set their comedic crosshairs on 'War Dogs'
NEW YORK — In War Dogs, Jonah Hill plays a boorish Miami stoner-turned-international arms dealer. But in reality, the two-time Oscar nominee insists that he "couldn't be less interested in guns."
"It wasn't like Moneyball, where I had to learn a lot about baseball and I continued liking baseball as a result," says Hill, 32, joined by his newly blond co-star Miles Teller at Manhattan's Mandarin Oriental hotel. Although, he concedes, his police training for the Jump Street franchise proved handy when it came to firing an AK-47 in this film. "I'm not a bad shot," Hill adds, "even though I don't even think that's something cool to brag about."
Teller, meanwhile, is more casual about firearms, despite not shooting any in War Dogs (in theaters nationwide Friday). "I have in my personal life," says the 29-year-old Whiplash breakout. "It's not anything that I abuse in any way, but I've shot pretty much every kind of gun."
Weapons are neither endorsed nor indicted in the R-rated crime comedy, which The Hangover's Todd Phillips directed from a script based on Guy Lawson's 2011 Rolling Stone article. The outrageous true story tracks the meteoric rise and downfall of twentysomething war profiteers Efraim Diveroli (Hill) and David Packouz (Teller), who in the mid-2000s, exploited a government loophole allowing small businesses to bid on U.S. Military contracts online, and wound up with a $300-million deal from the Pentagon to arm American allies in Afghanistan.
"The movie is more a condemnation of the system, rather than a direct commentary on guns themselves," co-screenwriter Jason Smilovic says. "When you think about defense contracts, you think about it being this impenetrable sphere of cronyism. I was very surprised that two young men who didn't have much in the way of education, or in the way of contacts, were able to break into that business by way of the anonymity of the Internet."
Landing somewhere between The Wolf of Wall Street and Scarface (referenced frequently throughout), Dogs mines laughs from the duo's over-the-top lifestyles and brazen exploits. Those include smuggling a truckload of Berettas into Iraq and repackaging Chinese ammunition at the urging of a blacklisted arms dealer (Bradley Cooper), spurring their arrests. But the film has its share of weightier moments, too, as David is caught in a web of lies with his wife (Ana de Armas) and Efraim's backstabbing severs their longtime friendship.
Reading Lawson's story for the first time, Hill was taken aback by "Efraim's complete disregard for their safety and how he manipulated his friend without regard for his feelings." Although he wanted to, he never got to meet the real Diveroli, who received a four-year prison sentence in 2011 and filed a lawsuit earlier this summer accusing Warner Bros. of misappropriation of his likeness.
"Our movie ends, but this story is not finished," says Teller, who spent time on set with Packouz, who served seven months under house arrest and cameos in Dogs as a retirement-home singer. "We made a movie and it's entertaining, but there are real people that have to deal with these consequences."
