As director Jeff Schaffer and writer David Mandel explained to UpRoxx, then movie, which was filmed entirely in Prague during a SARS outrbreak and the second Gulf War, had difficulty getting actors to fly in for cameos.

Schaffer:

So our pool of talented actors was reduced to, “Who’s shooting a movie in Prague right now?” And Matt Damon was shooting The Brothers Grimm in Prague. We were talking with him and his head was shaved because he had to wear a wig for that movie. And he had just stopped smoking so, in his words, he had “swelled up like a tick.” So he was buff. And we were talking to him so we said, hey, we’ve got this thing, would you like to do it? And he’s like, “That sounds fun, I’d love to.” And he was like, “I can do it on so and so day,” which I think was literally June 21, which is the longest day of the year. And, of course, we are shooting a night scene, in Prague, with five hours of darkness.

Mandel:

And it hasn’t hurt that Matt has luckily had a career as well. People who don’t know about the movie hear the song or see the scene and can’t believe that’s Matt Damon, which can be very helpful.

Scott Mechlowicz, who played Scotty added an anecdote:

Mechlowicz:

Matt Damon was great. “Scotty Doesn’t Know” follows him around, too. I think in the third Bourne film, if you listen closely, it’s playing in his little covert earpiece as he’s sniping someone. It helps channel his rage. He was there shooting Brothers Grimm with Heath Ledger. They used to go to the same bar on weekends during shooting.

As director Jeff Schaffer, writer David Mandel, co-writer from Lustra, Nick Cloutman, and actor Scott “Scotty” Mechlowicz explained to UpRoxx, while EuroTrip wasn’t a hit upon release, it took off 2 years later in 2006 on DVD and cable. And that’s when the song hit the Billboard Hot 100.

Cloutman:

One morning I got a call from this writer at Billboard and I was like who is this pranking me? He said we charted on the Hot 100 and we were one of the first unsigned bands, other than Lisa Loeb, to chart independently.

Schaffer:

Really? It did?

Mandel:

I’m not sure we knew that. No one alerted us to that one.

Cloutman:

What happened was we got this overwhelming response from people on MySpace. The fans were ultimately responsible for us charting on Billboard.

Schaffer:

You learn something new every day. I’m posthumously happy.

Cloutman:

The untold number of Scott’s lives we’ve affected.

Mechlowicz:

People quoted the movie from the outset, but it definitely exploded a little later. There was absolutely no social media back then, so it seemed to have caught fire once people were able to share. It’s strange to have a hit movie a little after its release.

Director Jeff Schaffer, writer David Mandel, and song co-writer from Lustra, Nick Cloutman explained to UpRoxx the creation of the song:

Schaffer:

I remember sitting in the office in Prague and we were trying to write some lyrics. We sort of went back and forth. We knew what the song was supposed to be, which is exactly what it is: it’s a guy singing about sleeping with Scotty’s girlfriend with Scotty’s girlfriend up there in front of Scotty.

Mandel:

The guys who wrote the song, the band Lustra, is his backup band. Those are guys, some of which, we went to college with. One is also a brother of a guy we went to college with. And Matt was also at Harvard around the same time and knew some of those guys as well. It was a great day to be a Harvard graduate, so that helps.

Cloutman:

Our guitar player had gone to school with David and our former guitar player was in the Lampoon with him. They knew about our band and we are looking for this song that has to basically play to the main character through the entire film. So they were like, “Would you guys be interested in taking a stab at it?

Mandel:

We were punching up the song lyrics the way we punch up jokes in the script. As far as we were concerned that was dialogue and we wanted it to be as funny as possible, except it had to rhyme a little bit.

Cloutman:

I thought they were looking for more subtle innuendos. And they weren’t.

Mandel:

Lustra had some good lyrics in there, but because we knew them we could talk to them a little easier and say, “Why don’t we try something like this?”

Schaffer:

We weren’t trying to make a catchy song, necessarily. We were trying to make a song that was telling this joke. We were trying to make what’s the most embarrassing thing you could do that could happen to you after graduation?

Cloutman:

I already had the annoying riff to the song lying around. I was like, I should do something with this, but I don’t know what. If you can imagine it slowed way, way down, in my head it always sounded like New Order. They were looking for pop-punk in the vein of a lot of music of the day, like Blink-182 or Sum 41. So we wrote for the genre.

Schaffer:

In the end, it’s a damn catchy song.