Cast members and director Mike Judge reunite to celebrate the 25th anniversary of a movie that mostly went ignored in theaters in 1999.
AUSTIN—The printer scene in Office Space came with specific instructions for the actors to get into the proper mental state to punish that peripheral: “Just think of something we hate.”
Actor Ron Livingston, who played Peter Gibbons in that endlessly quotable cult classic, recalled that on-set moment in a panel Saturday afternoon at SXSW celebrating the flick’s 25th anniversary. He also recounted the response of his colleagues Dave Herman (Michael Bolton) and Ajay Naidu (Samir Nagheenanajar): “They said, ‘no, we got this.'”
Livingston, Herman, Naidu, Stephen Root (Milton Waddams), and director Mike Judge reunited with moderator Stacey Wilson Hunt of The Hollywood Reporter to swap stories about the making of the movie and its cultural footprint since an unimpressive 1999 box-office debut. (Hunt apologized that Gary Cole, who played the dreadful boss Bill Lumbergh, couldn’t make the panel. Nor could Jennifer Aniston, who played Gibbons’ girlfriend Joanna, “because she’s Jennifer Aniston.”)
Judge explained that this painfully accurate depiction of IT drudgery began as an animated short featuring Milton loosely based on a co-worker at his first engineering job. “He was this weird guy not named Milton,” he said. “No one talked to him. He worked in logistics or something.”
But Judge did speak to him at one point: “He launched into this whole conversation about, if they move my desk one more time, I’m quitting.”
20th Century Fox head Peter Chernin saw a live-action movie coming out of that short and green-lit the project.
