In Jackass: Best and Last (2026), some of the cast get unexpectedly wistful about the possibility that this will be the final chapter of the brilliantly sophomoric series. The man who has been behind the camera and orchestrating the madness from the start, director Jeff Tremaine, has been feeling a bit emotional about it, too.
“I really felt it in the edit bay when we started opening up the old footage and looking back on how long we’ve been doing this,” Tremaine told me last Thursday. “Seeing all these guys as babies, that hit me a little bit. We thought that we would get one episode on TV—if we did—and it would just get shut down. We weren’t built to run long-distance, but somehow we did.”
Wearing a vintage Smiths T-shirt and giving off a boyish impishness despite his gray hair, Tremaine doesn’t look the part of an auteur. (He’s so wary of pretension he’d probably scoff at being described as one.) But alongside fellow Jackass cocreators Johnny Knoxville and Spike Jonze, he’s shaped the sensibility and aesthetic of the beloved franchise. And yet, despite the fact that Tremaine got his undergraduate degree in fine arts, having cultivated a love for painting and drawing from an early age, journalists tend not to write about him as a filmmaker—rather, as just another knucklehead in this collection of jokers. Which is why I wanted to talk to him about the artistic eye he’s brought to a cultural phenomenon best known for showing grown men getting hit in the groin. Somehow, Tremaine has crafted something unexpectedly touching and endearing from these seemingly coarse moments, spearheading a joyous comedy series that condemns homophobia while celebrating healthy male friendships.
Not that Tremaine thinks of Jackass in such elevated terms. Below, we discuss the show’s early days, why he gets nervous when critics like his movies, and that one time he made an American Airlines PSA.
Tim Grierson: Growing up, you had many different interests, including painting and design. Where did movies fit in?
Jeff Tremaine: I love movies—especially more indie and documentary-style movies—but I never aspired to be a director. When I got the job at Big Brother, which was a skateboarding magazine, that was the top for me: “I’m the boss, I get to lay out this magazine, I get to choose exactly what it looks like.” That was the pinnacle for me, career-wise, once I was at Big Brother and we started making videos.
Big Brother collected the biggest personalities in skateboarding—I was good at curating not necessarily the best skaters, but the most outrageous personalities. I just naturally know how to get stuff out of people that they didn’t think they would do. But I didn’t aspire to make a TV show. When Knoxville shot himself [with a handgun for a Big Brother video], that footage was really the moment where I felt this was bigger than the little skateboard video we were making. It was Knoxville’s ability to engage you. I also had Steve-O and Wee Man and [Chris] Pontius—these guys who are funny as hell. I was like, “Oh shit, this is maybe a TV show.”
TG: For someone who never wanted to be a director, it’s wild that you’re responsible for one of this century’s most enduring franchises.
JT: We used to all fit in one van. The cameraman, the sound guy and the cast—and I’m driving the van . . . for a Paramount movie! I had to drive Ryan Dunn to get the X-ray when he had the car up his ass—it’s not a union driver, it’s me.
Every movie, it has just kept growing and growing, to the point where I’m like, “We have all these fucking people. I don’t even know what everyone’s doing.” And we shoot 360—if the cameraman’s throwing up, you spin over and see him. Now if you spin over, there’s 60 people past him and 60 people beyond that. I was like, “How come we keep getting fucking bigger when I’m trying to keep it small?”
We used to not get permits and do things spontaneously, like kidnapping Brad Pitt. We had him at the office, and the idea to kidnap him came to my head. I’m like, “Hey, this will be funny. Pink’s [Hot Dogs] always has a line—let’s just put you in line. Let people see you, and then we’re going to roll up and kidnap you.” Within five minutes, we were in the van heading to Pink’s. I love that so much and I miss those days, because now we are a slow-moving, deliberate machine that is hard to control.
TG: How much did eventually needing to get permissions change your approach?
JT: Once you start getting permissions, you start getting restrictions. But I like operating with some restrictions—I think that forces me to be more creative.
I used to fight so hard with Paramount, which was negotiating with the MPAA over our ratings. It used to be that any frame of full-frontal male nudity required a justification. On Jackass 3D [2010], we had this scene where it was the super-slow-motion camera shooting Chris Pontius’s penis hitting a ping-pong ball like a baseball bat. His dick wiggled real slow, and it was a 40-second shot, or maybe even over a minute. They were like, “No, this is too long,” so I sped it up to the point where it stopped being magical. I just said, “This is as slow as I can slow it down—it’s a 30-second shot.” Paramount came back: “No, it’s got to be shorter.” I’m like, “Tell me the number,” and they’re like, “You can have ten seconds of penis exposed.” So we ended up putting a black bar over it, and then the black bar slides away and the dick hits the [ping-pong ball]—the funny part—and then the black bar comes back in and covers it. That was okay with them. [Laughs.]
TG: How much do you actually direct the guys’ performances?
JT: I don’t tell anyone what to say—it is their real personalities—but sometimes I can feel some hamminess and I’ll make them redo things. But it’s really more about putting them in situations where I know they’re going to say something funny. I know Chris Pontius is going to say something funny, so I always have him right next to the action, and I have a camera ready. I have no idea what he’s going to say, but I know if this bit isn’t as funny as it’s supposed to go, if you go to Chris, it’s going to turn a C into an A. A lot of what I do is picking who I think is going to be the funniest guy for this bit and then surrounding him with as much magic as I can.
From Jackass Number Two [2006] to [Jackass 3D] was the big production leap. It really required us shrinking this big world [around us] and letting [the cast] just deal with each other and me. There was a lot of me guarding the spontaneity we needed. We know that that’s what this thing lives for, so how do we keep it spontaneous without the ability to be as spontaneous as we used to be?
TG: Jackass: Best and Last shows us the first take of “The Magic Trick” (from Jackass Forever, 2022) that we never saw of Knoxville getting hit by the bull. The take wasn’t impressive enough, so you told Knoxville he had to do it again. The actual Jackass Forever clip is incredible, but it sent him to the hospital. What was that conversation like where you had to convince him to go out there for that second take?
JT: It was really hard for me to tell him we didn’t have it on that first hit. He wanted to hear that we got it—he knew we didn’t, everyone knew we didn’t, even though he broke two ribs on that first hit. I was at least glad that it was the bull’s fault and not that I didn’t have the camera in the right place—it was just that the bull didn’t hit him right.
He knew he had to go again, but he needed to hear it—I’m the one who has to tell him that. And it scared all of us because . . . fuck, man, I would never stand in front of a bull; I am terrified of that. But we knew, we’re going to do this until we get it right—and getting it right is getting it wrong. [Laughs.]
TG: Do you have the ultimate veto on whether a proposed bit will be filmed?
JT: Me and Knoxville are the judge and jury of all the ideas. He and I have conflicts at times if he wants to do something—sometimes I just have to appease him and try it, and a lot of times those are the very best ideas. Two examples are [“The High Five,” which involved smacking unsuspecting cast members with a large, spring-loaded hand]—he loved that idea, and I thought, “It’s never going to work,” until I was finally like, “He’s not quitting on this idea, so we have to figure out how to make it work.” And then the other one was “The Bear” in Jackass Forever, putting Ehren [McGhehey] in front of a bear. We were trying to come up with every way to drop a bear on him, and Knoxville wouldn’t let it go. There’s only going to be one or two bears in the world whose owner will let this happen, so you [have to] find a reckless animal wrangler who’s going to let us do this. [Laughs.] That was fun.
TG: It seemed like the critical consensus on the franchise shifted around the time Jackass 3D premiered at the Museum of Modern Art. Suddenly, you all were being taken seriously for turning lowbrow slapstick into high art. I’ve gotten the impression that you’ve never entirely enjoyed being embraced in that way, but what was your response to the MoMA gala?
JT: I thought it was hilarious, and you are picking up on something—I’ve always struggled with intellectualizing what we do. To me, it is just so surface-level: “This is what we do and it’s stupid. We’re magnifying stupid.” That’s all it is to me. That’s how I have to do it—I can’t do it in an artist’s mindset. We’re just being as outrageous as we can be, and I’ve got this group of exceptional dumb-dumbs. [Laughs.]
But MoMA was the sea change. I love reading a good intellectualized breakdown of what we do, and they’re right some of the time—and sometimes they’re just pulling shit out. I’m like, “That’s great that they think that,” but sometimes they are dead-on. They’re much more psychologically in tune than I am with what’s happening.
TG: I can’t think of another film series that’s gotten increasingly better reviews as more sequels have been released.
JT: We never got good reviews in the beginning—terrible reviews, always—and that fueled me. Not to try to get better reviews, but, “This is great, fuck you.” But it really hit me on Jackass Forever—we started getting these really nice reviews. I’m like, “This doesn’t feel right. Either we’ve been doing it too long and now the kids that we raised up are now the critics—or maybe we’re just not fucking punk anymore. Maybe we’ve lost it. Maybe now we’re mainstream—or maybe COVID just broke the world and we’re fucked.” [laughs] And a little bit of all of that’s true, but it’s still “Fuck the world” in our mindset—or mine, at least.
TG: Not a lot of people know you made this really elegant, stylish American Airlines safety PSA.
JT: That made me laugh—how the fuck am I even being considered to make a safety video for American Airlines, the biggest airline in the world? “You know who we got to get to do our safety video? The Jackass guy!” I was so tickled—I wanted that so bad just to say I did it. I finally said, “Safety first!” I’ve been “Safety third” my whole career. That might be the thing I’ve done that more people have seen than anything else. You’re forced to watch it every flight!
TG: The American Airlines PSA almost has the feel of a musical. So do some of the polished openings and closings you’ve done for the Jackass films. Do musicals interest you?
JT: Music has always been in the foreground for me. It’s not a background element in my life—it is a foreground element in my development. I don’t play music, but discovering punk rock, I was like, “Oh, there’s a whole culture that I like that’s not on the radio.” You find this and you find like-minded people—it’s just like skateboarding or BMX. I have it loud in my life always—and not any [particular] genre, even, just music. For Jackass, the music we put in is so important—it’s an homage, but also what we like.
TG: Is your painting in a punk rock style?
JT: I wouldn’t say it’s punk. What I do is all one thing. If I’m painting or if I’m directing, it’s all the same part of my brain firing. My excuse to not paint as much is that if I’m tapping my creative side [by directing], then I just don’t have it in the tank to [do anything else].
TG: You may roll your eyes, but the way you talk about your creative process is like an artist. You have a specific voice.
JT: I’m almost embarrassed that I found that voice early—and the voice didn’t change. [Laughs.] Goddamn it, I want it to evolve, but it just feels like the same fucking thing and it didn’t mature. I’m almost 60 years old, and I still like to draw dicks on things. It’s weird to me that that is still funny to me. I’m waiting to grow up.
