Caliendo on making of great Super Bowl video: Doing Belichick was like cheating

Bill Hofheimer at ESPN’s Front Row did a Q/A with Frank Caliendo on his now classic Super Bowl video Sunday. The best part: It gives me a reason to post the video again.

From the Q/A:

How long did it take you to write and shoot the piece?

I had some ideas lingering for a while. I knew I wanted to do a Chris Berman, Bill Belichick, and Ron Jaworski (I had been saving these characters). The main writing took 2-3 days, then lots of tinkering for a week or so. That’s usually the process. I also get help on punching things up from a group of a few people after I get the main beats of the sketch down. Shoot time only took two days, but with lots of crazy fast makeup changes. I had Berman down pretty well, but the other two impressions were not that good going into the shoot. For Jaws, I was able to key in on a couple of words during the shoot and it just started to happen. It got better and better on every take and suddenly it felt great. Belichick was like cheating. I knew I could do the facial expressions, so I just mumbled (which I had planned from the start). I always knew I wanted to do subtitles with Belichick. For some reason, I knew it would work. Lots of things just happened on the set, too. I added the dog, which I originally had not planned. We cut the sleeves off the hoodie and cut holes in the removed sleeve and put it on the dog.