One of the most hilarious and heartwarming films at this year’s Tribeca Festival consists of a pair of beloved comedians doing cocaine before going on a hike.
Directed by Michael LaHaie, “Bob and David Climb Machu Picchu” follows Bob Odenkirk and David Cross — longtime pals and the comedy duo behind cult favorite “Mr. Show” — as they embark on an epic adventure across Peru all the way to the top of Machu Picchu (or so they hope). Along the way, we see them sample local delicacies like coca leaves and alpaca, entertain the locals, and entertain each other with their distinctively zany brand of sketch-comedy humor.
There are a number of poignant moments as well, like footage of Bob in the hospital surrounded by family following his heart attack on the set of “Better Call Saul” in 2021 that nearly cost him his life, or David candidly sharing his worry over potentially being an “asshole” father like his own. But it’s mostly a really fun hang with two best friends who love nothing more than making each other laugh.
“When Bob and I get together, we very effortlessly fall into this rhythm,” Cross says.
Bob adds, “I got into show business to entertain myself, and secondarily make money doing it, and there’s no more reliable way for me to do that than to make something with David. There’s no thing that I do that’s going to reward me as much as time spent doing this job with him.”
Variety spoke with Bob and David ahead of the Tribeca premiere of “Bob and David Climb Machu Picchu” about their film and friendship, and as expected, the talk quickly went off the rails.
Hey fellas.
Bob: Happy to do this. I don’t know about David, but I was busy this morning canceling my appearance at the Freedom 250.
David: I’m taking his place.
Bob: The bottom line is, I was supposed to go on after Vanilla Ice and before Bret Michaels, and then I heard that Bret dropped out, and then I was moved to before Vanilla Ice. And you know me and Vanilla… Variety has written extensively about this. And it didn’t start with me.
David: What I am doing is I’m going in your spot but I’m going as you, and what I’m going to do is mock your old bit, Milli Vanilli Ice. I’ll be doing that.
Bob: Which was never meant to be an insult to Vanilla Ice!
David: It’s an homage! An homaaaage.
Bob: And by the way, canceling Freedom 250 was so much harder than signing up. So David, if you decide to cancel, get a lawyer on your side now.
David: I don’t know why I would!
David, I feel like I must address the elephant in the room: I have the same name as your daughter. Who’s she named after?
David: This guy, Marlow Stern. This kid, he has so many hopes and dreams of becoming a crack entertainment journalist and we don’t know what happened to him! Maybe he got swept up in the Knicks mania? I don’t know.
Courtesy of Left/Right and OPE
[Laughs] David, how did you cook up this idea of hiking Machu Picchu and why did you ask Bob to join you?
David: I’d been saying I wanted to do it for quite a while, and I thought, “I’m getting old, and I need to do it.” And I thought, “Who could I go with that I’d want to hang out with for a while that likes hiking?” And I thought of Bob immediately. The whole process took about 17 seconds.
And Bob, did your big health scare make you want to embark on more adventures like this one?
Bob: Definitely. It’s made me examine what I’m doing with my time. You get on a train of work, and you’re lucky to get work in showbiz, and when things go well you want to make the most of it. Then the heart attack happened, and I had years worth of projects that I’d already said “yes” to, but I wanted to slow the train down and take in my life a little more — and also spend time with people I like, people who make me laugh and people I enjoy being around. This was perfect, and I’d like to do more of this kind of thing. I suppose I could be self-starter and do it myself, but of course I immediately think about, “How am I going to make more money in show business?” [Laughs]
It’s one thing to actually go on the hike and another to document it for public consumption.
Bob: The Beatles inspired me. I had enjoyed that six-hour Beatles doc [“The Beatles: Get Back”], which is just hanging out with the Beatles, and I was like, “That was the greatest! If there were two more hours of me sitting in the room with them just piddling around on their instruments and making wisecracks, I would be up for that.” And that’s what a lot of podcasts are, too. There are a lot of people who just like to hang out with Bob and David.
Courtesy of Left/Right and OPE
Were there any tense moments?
Bob: There was a stress that I had, and I don’t address it in the movie, which is: The Inca Trail was built over 100 years by slaves who had been taken captive by the Incans, and all the steps are different heights. It’s risky. I had to leave from there and do two action movies in a row where you can’t have a broken ankle or fuck up your body, so the whole time I’m doing this I’m like, if this thing ends with me twisting my ankle and I fuck up two feature films that have crews waiting to go, I will be ashamed of myself and really feel bad. It kind of held me back and I couldn’t just relax. Having said that, you really should pay attention when doing the Inca Trail because there are a lot of ways you could hurt yourself due to the crude engineering that went into it.
David: You know, I don’t feel comfortable with Bob denigrating slave labor. Those guys worked hard.
Bob: They did a good job — considering…
David: I know what you’re saying: “You get what you paid for.”
Bob: Exactly.
David, what’s it like seeing Bob in Liam Neeson mode as this action star? If one of my buddies suddenly became an action hero, it’d be a trip.
David: That took a long time from the initial concept of Bob going, “This is something I wanna do,” to actually getting to do it and it coming out. When I went and saw it, one thing that was overriding throughout the entire experience — because I knew the backstory — was I could tell how much he was enjoying it. I wouldn’t necessarily say that with “Saul,” even though I know how important it was to him, but with “Nobody” I could tell watching him that he was enjoying himself. That’s a cool thing to see. It’s almost like a weird sense of pride.
Who would win in a fight between you two?
David: Oh, Bob. I can outrun him, but if he managed to catch up to me, I think he would. I’m one of those wiry Tasmanian devil guys.
Bob: Well, I know for a fact that I would win in a fake fight.
Courtesy of Left/Right and OPE
Bob, I love your Robert Durst recurring bit in the doc where you keep reenacting his hot mic moment when you pee. What tickles you so much about Robert Durst?
Bob: It’s the funniest thing ever! The guy goes to take a pee and admits to a murder because he forgets he’s doing a documentary?! It’s the best thing ever! You put that in a script and they’d be like, nobody would do that! Because he’s got to talk to himself out loud in the bathroom?! Oh man, that’s the best. I’m glad you got it. I hoped people would get it because not everyone saw [“The Jinx”] and it was a few years ago, but I don’t think anyone forgot what happened there. I did it every time I peed the whole time.
What was the Peruvian delicacy that was the most eye-opening for you guys? We see you try coca leaves, alpaca skewers — we don’t see any guinea pig consumption.
David: We did it guinea pig. Neither one of us cared for it, but the alpaca was really good.
Bob: Alpaca is great! I don’t know how much meat they have on them, but if anyone got that going, it’s really good.
Is this the first in a series of “Bob and David” excursions? Where to next?
Bob: David has an idea for something that I would like to do…
David: So, it’s inspired by a chapter in a Bill Bryson book, “Neither Here nor There,” where he travels to Hammerfest, Norway, which is the southernmost city in Norway and in the Arctic Circle and as of its writing, had the most bars per capita of anywhere on the planet. We’d go to see the northern lights, and to get there is a difficult journey because there’s no direct way — you take a flight to a train to a bus and go on a sled with reindeer for part of it. Most of it will be the journey to it, and you get there and will be hopefully rewarded by seeing the northern lights.
Bob: You’re not telling the whole story!
David: And then you do a bar crawl and then you vomit, which is one of their currencies.
Bob: And this is a request I had, and you would not let me do it in Machu Picchu: So, I’m a fan of Bear Grylls, and I said to David that I wanted to drink my urine, your urine, a mix of the urine. At no point did we get there, but I’m hoping that this journey would get us to that place where we have to drink our urine.
David: I’m a little… I don’t have the image that Bob has for that, but I’ll do it!
Bob: I’ve seen it so much now on TV with Bear that you can just… taste it.
David: He’s come out with a line of his own urine. There’s Texas Barbecue, Sour Cream and Onion, all kinds of stuff.
Courtesy of Left/Right and OPE
I would be remiss if I didn’t ask about the fairly recent footage of RFK Jr. working out with jeans on in the sauna and climbing into a tub with the jeans on. Everyone on the internet was sharing side-by-side photos of him and your “Arrested Development” character Tobias in his cut-off jeans in the shower and calling RFK Jr. a fellow “never nude.”
David: I’m not on that part of the internet very much, but a lot of people were forwarding it to me. I mean, it’s no crazier than any of the other shit he’s done and I’m not the first person to make this observation, but when you go to the gym and there’s a guy working out in jeans, to me, that’s weird immediately. That’s a weird thing! He seems like that kind of guy. He seems disturbed on some level.
Bob: I have not seen that image yet, but I’m happy for everyone that we get to suffer the rantings and ravings of a fucking nutcase and that he’s been given such power. It’s just the best. What else have we got to do with our lives besides deal with his kooky inspirations?
The fact that Larry David is the one that set him up with his wife is wild. There’s a comedy connection here.
Bob: What a mess. What a nightmare! What a nightmare. There’s going to be some great books about that. There’s gonna be some great books.
Bob, were you reluctant to share footage of you in the documentary post-heart attack? It’s an intimate moment and I found it quite moving amid this fun journey.
Bob: No, I wasn’t. In a weird way I’m glad to do it, because this thing’s been talked about it so much and it’s almost like, “Did that really happen? Did it really happen? It’s so crazy.” And that footage makes it very real — and it makes it very real for me, because that whole week was a blank for me; I don’t remember any of it. So, for me, it’s even like, oh right, this thing happened and it was pretty powerful and devastating and I could’ve died easily, so I’m fine with seeing it and remembering that that actually happened. A lot of people want to talk to me about how it impacted me and how you philosophically look at your life differently when something like that happens to you, and a big part of talking about it is getting people to go and ask whether they should see their doctor or start taking aspirin when you’re 50. Really, all guys should take aspirin every day. Anything I can do to help people look into their heart health is good. And I think it’s funny to see me laid out like that!
David, how did Bob’s heart attack impact you? Did it make you reevaluate your guys’ friendship and want to spend more time with Bob?
David: Yes and no. I would’ve wanted to do all those things regardless of the heart attack. I haven’t really articulated it since, but when it was clear that he was going to be OK, I kind of wanted to just forget about it and push it aside, because that was a tough 48 hours. I made a joke before that I got it out of my system — his inevitable passing, like, “Oh, I did that already” — but my emotional response when it was over, in a kind of immature way, was, “OK, let’s move on! Let’s have fun again.” I see what you’re saying — I should have written a poem! I should have written a poem…
