For Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, Sisters was like fantasy camp

Are you ever really too old for a house party?

Tina Fey and Amy Poehler play — what else — sisters who throw one last blowout after discovering their parents plan to sell the family home. “[My character] kind of loses her mind as the party goes on,” Poehler says. “I got to break through ceilings and watch trees smash through houses and drunkenly mouth off to a cop. It’s fantasy camp for a 40-something-year-old woman.”

The inspiration for the film’s screenplay came from longtime SNL writer Paula Pell, her relationship with her sister, and the journals they kept as teenagers. “My sister was three years older and foxy and her diary was always like, ‘I went camping with Bill, I might be pregnant.’ Mine were always like, ‘I changed the grit on my rock tumbler,’ ” she says.

So how did seeing her script brought to life by her longtime friends feel? “The scene of the two of them in the bathtub together, I looked at them and burst into tears. It was too much!” Life quickly began to imitate art on the Long Island set. “We spent so many nights in that house,” says Poehler. “Just like in the movie it got progressively more trashed. By the end, it really did smell totally gross.”

More from EW’s Fall Movie Preview:

•Jennifer Lawrence on the Joy of working with David O. Russell

•Jem and the Holograms was made with ‘new generation’ in mind

•The evolution of The Good Dinosaur, Pixar’s long-in-the-works film

•Shooting the new Point Break at 165 miles per hour

To continue reading EW’s Fall Movie Preview, and to see more exclusive photos, pick up the new issue of Entertainment Weekly, on newsstands now, or buy it here.

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