The comedy team behind Happy Birthday, Harris Malden talks to ReelzChannel.com.

What exactly is a sweaty robot, you might be asking?

"We like robots," Nick Gregorio tells me during an interview with the five young filmmakers that make up the comedy team known as Sweaty Robot.

"It's just neat sounding," Gregorio continues. "When we first started, we were like, what should we call ourselves? Laser Gun Ninja Sword? No, ninjas are played out. Cyber-Motorcycle? No, I don't own a motorcycle. In college, Eric [Levy] and I worked on a senior project and it was Sweaty Productions and it was just a topless man sweating... And then we like robots. We boiled it down to sweaty and robot."

The comedy team is made up of Juan Cardarelli, Ben Davidow, Nick Gregorio, Eric Levy and Matthew Sanchez. Together, they have written, directed and acted in 17 short films (the bulk of which are available on their official site, Sweatyrobot.com) and have recently completed their first feature length movie, Happy Birthday, Harris Malden.

In Harris Malden, Gregorio plays Harris, a somewhat aloof young man who is tormented by the fire that took the life of his father and left him unable to grow facial hair. For years Harris has been faking his facial hair, drawing it on with a Sharpie or through other various methods. His best friend, Paul Levine (Eric Levy) has never had the nerve to tell him exactly how ridiculous the fake facial hair looks. But when Paul's girlfriend, Susan (Brigitte Hagerman) can't take it anymore and blurts out a comment on the fake facial hair at Harris's birthday party, his world is turned upside down.

The group is in town for the Cinevegas film festival to premiere Happy Birthday, Harris Malden and hopefully find someone to pay them enough money that they can quit their day jobs and become full-time filmmakers. And if the terrific reception Malden has been getting so far during Cinevegas, it should only be a matter of time before Sweaty Robot joins the likes of other successful comedy teams such as Broken Lizard, The State and Kids in the Hall.

To start our interview off, Gregorio offers an abbreviated history of how the group came to be. "Sweaty Robot, I'll give you the quick and dirty version. Ben and I went to high school together. I went to college and met Juan, Eric and Matt and then Ben became friends with all of us through the friend of a friend program. Then, after college, we started making movies together."

"Some of the earliest stuff we did was completely improvised off of an absurd idea," Eric Levy tells Reelz. "Then we decided to do scripted stuff. We've kind of tried every different style to see what we liked the best and by doing that developed our own style and then put that into Happy Birthday Harris Malden."

"Improv" seems to be the buzz word in the comedy world these days, with many comedy fans assuming that the latest Judd Apatow or Will Ferrell movie barely has a script. But the guys at Sweaty Robot say their movies are generally crafted on the page. "It isn't really that improv-y," says Levy. "We aren't slaves to the script, but we knew the goal of the script and we knew the goal of a lot of the lines. You can tweak them here and there, but you have to get the message of the scene across. That's paramount."

Gregorio continues: "It comes down to creating a world, a world in which these characters live in. If we can create that world together from the ground up, then the vision becomes singular. It's kind of like the Star Wars universe - a lot of nerds can rip on it, but they work within a set of rules that are already laid down. Then we'll always know what a character should say in a situation... There's no curve balls."

Malden is based on a short film the team made a few years ago. Although they made a number of shorts afterward, their fans kept coming back to Harris Malden as a perennial favorite.

"[It] originally started out as a short film for a documentary competition about little while lies. We said, 'Let's go completely oddball and do a mockumentary about a guy who fakes his facial hair.' And we ended up winning the festival over real documentaries..."

"People found a common ground dealing with insecurities. A prime example is Britney Spears, she walks around with that crazy wig on her head and looks like the Predator."

Coincidentally, Britney was spotted at one of the Cinevegas parties at The Palms over the weekend. And yes, the wig looks weird.

The character of Harris Malden was based on people the group knew growing up in Philadelphia - the kind of people who walk around with uni-brows or terrible comb-overs.

"There's a lot of people...if there friends would just say something," Gregorio says with a laugh.

"Obviously nobody loves you," Brian Davidow adds.

"Some people just stick themselves in a place and that's that," Gregorio continues. "They won't change their wardrobe from 1970. You're very dated, you have the same hairdo, you don't leave your neighborhood."

Harris Malden's continuous variety of bizarre fake facial hair scores some of the biggest laughs in the movie.

"In the short film, sometimes it was just scribbled on with a sharpie," Levy says. "With the feature, we took this whole thing seriously, so you can't imagine how many conversations we had about mustaches, what goes where..."

"This is how serious we were," says Gregorio. "Eric works in an architecture firm. We had laser cut out mustaches from wood that were later cast in foam latex that we did ourselves. Each mustache had to be perfect. We wanted the curly-cue because that gets a laugh. The goatee gets a really good laugh and the crazy evil mustache was just perfect."

Shockingly, the group managed to survive the production and even remain friends while shooting the feature movie and living together at the same time. "We got to go home at the end of the day and talk about what we were going to do the next day. We'd basically shoot for 14 hours and then go home and talk about the movie for six more hours," says Davidow.

"We're all very confrontational in a way," says Gregorio. "But that's not something that distracts from our friendships and our relationships. That actually makes them stronger. The second you can't argue something out with someone and then find a resolution in that, that's when you've become so aloof and cold [that] you're inhuman... Matt and I actually shared a room... It was 100 degrees at night, sweating, and Matt wouldwake up and say, 'Okay, in this scene...'" (Laughs)

"We fought this morning," says Davidow. "If Juan lived up to his threats, I think everybody in my family would be dead." (Laughs)

Happy Birthday, Harris Malden has already drawn some great critical praise and audiences seem to love it. Now it's all about finding someone with the money to market it appropriately. So far, Hollywood has been giving the guys at Sweaty Robot a bit of the runaround.

"We're onto some pretty good leads and everybody seems pretty confident that we can sell this film," says Gregorio before offering up his Hollywood exec imitation: "Even though it's hard to market, hard to market, hard to market." (Laughs)

"A movie without a star is hard to market," Levy adds in his best agent voice. "You guys are great though. Don't like you. Hard to market. (Laughs)

The boys aren't discouraged though. They are certainly hoping the time will come soon where they can ditch the day jobs, but for now they'll keep spending every waking moment they can find (sometimes while at their day jobs) writing and directing new projects. "

"We have a few complete scripts," Levy says. "Then we have some pretty concrete ideas floating out there. It's just a matter of taking the time to do the one at the budget that we can get. Someone has to see Harris Malden and say, 'These guys have to make another one.'"