Last night, select members of the press and those lucky enough to get in after waiting in line for hours were treated to an advance screening of Dax Shepard‘s new movie Hit & Run. The film, which also features Tom Arnold, Kristen Bell, Kristin Chenoweth, Joy Bryant and a ridiculous looking Bradley Cooper, is about Charlie Bronson (Shepard) who is trying to start a new life after entering the witness protection program a year ago. He meets a new woman (Bell) and everything seems to be peachy. But when his girlfriend lands a new job in Los Angeles, which just so happen to be the place he got away from, Charlie decides to return home and a series of chaotic events remind him why he should have maybe reconsidered. With his friend and federal agent (Tom Arnold), Bell’s still smitten old boyfriend (Michael Rosenbaum) and the couple he went into WPP for in the first place (Cooper and Bryant) all after him, hijinx ensue.

The movie is a pretty hilarious romantic comedy of sorts with sweet cars and driving (the stunts and cars are all Shepard’s) and quite a few laugh out loud moments. Without actually reviewing the film, I would say that it’s certainly worth seeing. The dialog and interaction between characters is well done and was reportedly made on a shoestring budget with a bunch of favors falling in to help Shepard, who both wrote and produced the film.

After the screening, Shepard and Arnold surprised the crowd and held an impromptu Q&A for the film. Shepard revealed that it was easy to have an on screen relationship with Kristen Bell because, well, they are in a real life relationship.

“Kristen and I are obviously a real life couple so that can be real dodgy,” Shepard says. “We just decided we’re not going to hide the fact that we’re a couple, we’re going to embrace it and I don’t regret it. It helps drive the movie and we can get away with some really heightened things.”

The interaction between Bell and Shepard is not the only high point in the film loosely based on their real life relationship. A number of interesting (and quite controversial) conversations in the film are also a product of real life interactions that Shepard has either heard or been a part of.

“I try to write things that I’ve actually heard or conversations I’ve had into my dialog,” Shepard reveals of the eyebrow raising dialog that touches on race, sex and the like. “The best dialog is very specific and detail oriented. I definitely do a lot of listening.”

But there’s one particular conversation in the movie that involves Bradley Cooper’s character and anal sex that is almost too good to be true. Shepard reveals that although that particular situation may not have happened, the inspiration came from watching HBO one night with a friend and the wild conversation that followed.

“We were watching this HBO show called ‘Hookers On The Point’ and there was a particular episode where a man is being pleasured by one of the hookers and he starts saying ‘Oh man I want some balls in my mouth!’” Shepard says about the inspiration for the Cooper scene that will surely have people talking. “We were like what did he say? Then it comes out that he was recently in prison and we start thinking that maybe it just gets really confusing for a guy who just got out of jail. So I started thinking that if he hooked up with a white guy and he was black that maybe he wouldn’t think he was gay. This is a real sincere conversation that me and my other producer had to try and make sense of this ‘Hookers On The Point’ episode. We really wondered if certain things were less emasculating than others and wrote it in the script.”

Hit & Run hits select theaters on August 24th.

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