You may know Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim as the inscrutable masterminds behind Adult Swim's Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!, a surrealist comedy program that dove butt-first into the oubliette that is public access television.


And this spring, the duo releases Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie, a gleefully deranged cinematic nugget about them blowing $1,000,000,000 of Robert Loggia's money on a movie before fleeing to a derelict shopping mall run by Will Ferrell.

io9 ran into the duo at the film's New York premiere last night. We picked their brains about their new apocalyptic comedy show and Jeff Goldblum. (Also, Tim was happy we posted his UFO sighting.)


In Billion Dollar Movie, your characters inherit a post-apocalyptic shopping mall filled with squatters and a mysterious being known as the "Yogurtman." How did you get the mall to look so shitty?

Tim Heidecker: It came that way! We found a mall that was abandoned, and we had to clean it up in order to work in there. We cleaned it up and wrecked it again, and cleaned it up and wrecked it again.

The mall has also been taken over by a wolf. How was it working with the wolf?

TH: One of the things we had to do in the editing was to make it look scary. The wolf was a lot sweeter in person.


Speaking of costars, you also worked with Jeff Goldblum, the one and only Brundlefly. What's that like?

Eric Wareheim: He's the best. He really respects our work, and we love him. Truly an actor's actor.


What is the origin of "Shrim"?

EW: Shrimming is based on a lot of really far-out religions that we ran into when we went out to Los Angeles. Shrimming is a comment on all those hippie-dippy religions with healing powers and Scientology and E-meters. It's the idea of how all these things heal you, but nothing really works.


Now that Billion Dollar Movie is out, what projects are you working on?

TH: We're going to take a breath and see what it all means. But we're really exploring a couple ideas about the end of the world. We think it's good fodder for comedy. In our vision, the end of the world is something that happens very slowly and painfully.


EW: It's a new television show that is in development right now. It's still really top secret, but it's the new Tim and Eric show about the end of the world. It's going to be a really fucked-up, non-sketch show.

If you could be given full creative reign on any single science fiction work, what would it be?


EW: Battlestar Galactica. I love Cylons, but I'd make them all nude.

Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie is out on video-on-demand now and in theaters March 3. At left, my personal favorite T&EASGJ! sketch, Crystal Shyps.