Dying is easy, and comedy is hard. According to Neighbors 2 director Nick Stoller, the only thing that can make it harder is to make it a sequel.

Neighbors 2 had the distinct challenge of continuing from a comedic story that tied up nicely in the original installment. Neighbors has a great ending that resolves in a satisfactory way for all (well, most) of the characters involved. They had reached the end of their arc. There was nowhere else for them to go.

In fact, when Universal announced that a sequel was on its way, I wondered aloud on Twitter and Facebook how they could keep it going for another two hours.

Then the trailer came out.

It was right there in front of our eyes this whole time, and we didn’t see it. According to director and co-writer Nick Stoller, that was the first thing that they wanted to explore when discussing a potential sequel.

“We very quickly settled on the sorority moving in next door,” said Stoller. “That was the obvious place to go.”

The seemingly home-run concept didn’t grant them license to coast through the writing process, though. In fact, they had to work twice as hard to make it work.

Ultimately, all that work pays off in the finished movie, but two weeks ago on the Universal Lot, nobody was quite sure how this sequel would be received by the public.

Although most of the people around the brilliantly conceived press junket were yelling and screaming in delight (Seth Rogen and Chloë Grace Moretz were playing cornhole in front of one of the houses on the lot’s frat row set), Stoller himself seemed a little removed and nervous.

Once I told him how much my fiance and I enjoyed the film, he relaxed and loosened up a bit, noticeably relieved. It’s Stoller’s first sequel after all (he doesn’t count the Forgetting Sarah Marshall spinoff Get Him to the Greek), and he found continuing the storyline he wrapped up so well Neighbors to be particularly difficult.

“This was the hardest movie I’ve done — creatively — because the sequel aspect is very hard,” said Stoller. “From the beginning, Seth [Rogen] and I were like ‘we don’t want this to suck.’”

Writing a funny, accurate, and satisfying sequel

Ultimately, the movie finds its roots in exploring similar subjects to the original, but just evolved one step further. If the original is about college students that refuse to stop partying, then this one is about the kids that are able to decide what they want for themselves, regardless of what the crowd around them demands. If the first one was about learning to adapt to the responsibilities of having a child, then this one is about learning to recognize whether or not you’re a good parent. These themes resonate particularly well with Stoller, who has two children himself.

“Both this movie and the last one were my love letters to parenting. With the first movie, it was freaking out about having a kid. By then I was already through that, but I had that experience. This one is about freaking out about being a bad parent.”

According to Stoller, it’s these emotional themes that give a comedy the weight that it needs to survive. However, he also admits that the movie truly found its place through constant rewrites. “We rewrote the script about 28 million times,” said Stoller. “Literally every possible version of this movie has been written at this point.”

They also faced the difficulty of being a group of male writers that wanted to make a story that in part dealt with the lack of gender equality at the university. All of the credited writers are the same men that wrote the original film, so how would they go about telling a story largely based around females?

“We did a roundtable with a bunch of women writers to make sure that we were hitting stuff was appropriate, or that was accurate and honest,” said Stoller. “We also had two comedy writers on set, Amanda Lund and Maria Blasucci, who are really funny writers and actors as well.”

Stoller also wanted to make sure that the actors themselves felt comfortable inside of their characters.

“I closely interviewed Chloe, Kiersey, and Beanie,” said Stoller. “I do that with all of my actors, but I really wanted to make sure everything worked.”

The comedies with the best endings

Endings are an art form. For comedies, and especially comedy sequels, they’re especially difficult. Because of his habit of constantly delivering satisfying comedic endings, we asked Stoller how he manages to keep pulling it off.

“It’s hard as hell,” laughed Stoller. “A trick is to call back to the biggest joke, but often, you don’t know what the biggest joke is until the first edit. And even then, it’s a trick.”

But are there any films out there that manage to pull it off perfectly?

“The 40-year Old Virgin had a perfect ending” said Stoller. “Rushmore has a perfect ending. I’ll be cocky, I think Forgetting Sarah Marshall has a perfect ending.”

Stoller reveals that the key lies in giving your characters true emotional stakes that will allow viewers to go through a journey and laugh along the way, as opposed to just laughing at a movie because it’s funny.

“The best comedies are inherently dramatic,” said Stoller. “What the characters are going through need to have legitimately high stakes. If it’s just a bunch of silly jokes, that’s what makes things suck.”

Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising hits theaters today, May 20, 2016.