Wet Hot American Summer director David Wain spoke with ComingSoon’s Tyler Treese to celebrate the film returning to theaters for its 25th anniversary. Wain discussed Paul Rudd not aging, some of its iconic scenes, and reuniting with several of its stars in Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass (which is out today on Digital). Wet Hot American Summer returns to theaters on August 14, 2026.

“It’s the last day of Camp Firewood’s season, but there’s still time for the big talent show, a little romance… and for everyone to be wiped out by the piece of NASA’s Skylab that’s hurtling toward Earth,” says the official synopsis.

Tyler Treese: David, such a pleasure to speak with you. This has been such an exciting time for you with Gail Daughtry coming out and now Wet Hot American Summer returning to theaters. I rewatched the film last night. It is wild seeing how young everybody looks, except for Paul Rudd. He looks exactly the same. I don’t know what magic he has. It’s really bizarre.

David Wain: Sorry, I know you’re in the middle of a question, but I’m just going to interject. I was with Paul Rudd in person at an event just a couple of months ago. Up close, you’re like, “What the fuck?” Because it doesn’t look like he’s had any work done. You’re just like, “You just didn’t age. What’s wrong with you?”

Even the joke of them coming back for the prequel doesn’t work for him because he doesn’t look older. It’s crazy. What immediately sticks out to you when you look back at this film and reminisce?

Every time I’ve seen either part of it or all of it, which is not all that often, different little flashes of memories come back that I hadn’t thought about in a long time.

The last time I saw it was in Cleveland, which is my hometown, at a screening at a summer camp. I was really moved at the end. Maybe even more as an adult, looking back nostalgically at summer camp as a time, seeing Janeane Garofalo and Michael Showalter walk off at the end really got me choked up.

For me personally, that movie is all about my emotional memories of being a teenager and being at summer camp more than anything else.

I’m from Pennsylvania, so I got very excited when I watched the credits and saw it was shot in PA, a little north of Scranton. How did you wind up choosing Pennsylvania to shoot the film?

It’s inspired by the summer camp I went to in Maine, and Michael Showalter’s camp was in the Berkshires. We ended up visiting both places when we were researching.

But the answer to your question is that we were searching all over for a camp that would allow us to shoot there in the spring, right before summer camp opens, which is a lot to ask. We found this one place that was only a three-hour drive from New York City, so it was manageable for cast and crew to go back and forth.

This cast has aged incredibly. So many people have become big stars. I was shocked to find even Kyle Gallner, who’s just blowing up and doing great work recently. He was one of the kids. He’s a swimming buddy of the kid who drowns. What’s most rewarding about seeing this cast become more stacked and having worked with all these people before they blew up and playing a part in helping make them the stars they are?

Knowing people like Elizabeth Banks and Bradley Cooper, for example, I didn’t do anything. Those people were rocket ships on the way to the moon whether I had anything to do with it or not.

But it is amazing that this family of people, where we all did this thing early on in different versions of early in our lives, became such a springboard for so many incredible stories of people’s lives. It is wild.

Obviously, you could never predict it. I knew Bradley Cooper was going to be a star. Did I know he was going to be the supernova he is? How could you ever predict that?

This film also features one of my favorite David Hyde Pierce performances. I think he’s so underrated as a performer. What stood out about working with him? He was one of the bigger names during filming.

DHe was so great. Unlike some people, his attitude when he became a big, rich, and famous star was, “Great, I have money now. I don’t need any more.”

He was the easiest deal to make of anyone. He was also so generous with his time. He came and was meeting up with a large group of people who mostly knew each other and were mostly a bit younger than him.

He was just the best. So funny, warm, generous, and just the best.

One of my favorite lines in the film is when Paul Rudd’s making out with Elizabeth Banks and he says, “You taste like a burger. I don’t like you anymore.” That’s stood the test of time. Do you remember who wrote that and how that came to be?

David Wain: Basically, the entire movie was written by me and Mike Showalter just sitting at a computer and being like, “What have you done?” Just typing stuff.

Every line is pretty much that. There are a few things I might remember that an actor improvised, but 95% of it is just us goofing around and being like, “How about this? How about this?”

I love the mad dash near the end where they’re searching for the phone in the nurse’s cabin. Tell me how that was filmed. I assume that had to be one take because they’re just destroying everything inside and wrecking stuff.

I remember we actually did it two times. It was a low-budget movie with an incredibly quick schedule, and we were shooting on 35mm film with one camera. That was the whole thing.

For this particular scene, we worked very hard to come up with an idea of what the camera path could be and how it could work to do this as a oner. It was a cool way to do it, but we also honestly didn’t have time to shoot multiple setups.

We mapped it out with the actors and then were like, “Okay, let’s hope for the best.” We did it two times, and they added so much and made it so funny.

We didn’t give them a ton of specifics. We just said, “Go in and knock stuff over and do whatever.”

This was your debut feature as a director. What were the biggest lessons you learned that really shaped your career moving forward?

Obviously, because it was not only my first time as a feature director, it was the first time directing something with an actual proper crew in a real professional situation of any kind. I knew nothing before that.

I had done directing of other types, but I had to ask the first AD, “Wait, who says roll camera? How does it work?” I didn’t know anything. But I learned so much. One of the many lessons I learned was how much necessity can be the mother of invention and how many elegant solutions to problems come from that.

I might have a much more complicated idea for a scene, but we had no time, so I’d come up with a much simpler solution and it would ultimately be the better solution.

There were a million lessons like that about how to prioritize what’s important in a scene or understand the thrust of it. It also started to form my idea of how important it is to keep to the emotional spine and structure of something, even if it’s utterly silly.

One thing that makes this film so rewatchable is that the counselors are the focus, but you got so many great performances and bits out of the kids as well. It’s especially fun watching the backgrounds of some scenes because there are always people acting a little goofy in the background.

Those are all the kids in the movie. I think almost all of the kids were local Pennsylvania casting. They came with their parents every day, and we really lucked out. There were just so many great kids.

How did you approach working with the kids compared to the more seasoned actors?

In a way, it’s the same as with any actor, which is you try to assess as quickly as you can who they are, how they work, and what they need.

With certain kids, if they have no experience, it’s better to say as little as possible and let them just be themselves. Other times, with a kid, you need to be a lot more prescriptive and say, “Stand here, look that way, and repeat after me,” or something.

It just depends. A big part of directing is reading your actors and trying to understand what level to get in with them and what approach is going to be most effective. Every person is different.

Clearly, you’re effective at finding actors on the right level because so many of these people have popped up in your other films. We just saw a bunch of people from Wet Hot American Summer in Gail Daughtry in a bunch of fun roles. What does it mean for you to have these people who still want to collaborate and that this means so much to them that they still want to work with you?

David Wain: It’s a real honor, obviously. I feel like it’s a result of having prioritized over the years working with people I like, who are friends, and who I have a history and a shorthand with.

When Ken Marino and I were casting Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass, we often said, “We could cast A or B, who are equally good, but B is our friend who we’ve worked with many times.” Of course, bring in the friend.

I think people do want to work with us because I’ve also prioritized making the experience fun and joyous and understanding that we’re not trying to cure cancer. We’re just trying to make some people laugh, and the experience of doing it should be fun.

People come and know that we’re going to have a good time. They also know that we put a lot of effort and time into the script, the prep, and the post, so they have a chance of looking good.

This film has been making people laugh for 25 years, and it will continue to do so. I just want to say, I loved Gail Daughtry as well. The whole “I’m going to make you sick” line had me laughing so hard each and every time.

It releases on digital [today] and is back in theaters, so I hope people will check that one out as well.

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Thanks to David Wain for taking the time to talk about Wet Hot American Summer.