Though he doesn’t appear in Dax Shepard’s filmmaking mockumentary Brother’s Justice — which follows Shepard (as himself) and producing partner Nate Tuck on a years-long quest to make a martial arts action movie entitled, yes, Brother’s Justice — Chuck Norris figured prominently in the genesis of the project. “Originally I envisioned fighting Chuck Norris in the third act,” Shepard explained to Movieline via telephone. “That was our full goal, that I would fight him at the end of the movie.”

Shepard’s vision, alas, wasn’t meant to be. Norris declined the offer through his rep (despite Shepard’s offer to compensate in kind by appearing gratis in Norris’s Total Gym workout infomercials) and the film — which took five years of planning, hustling, adapting, calling in favors, and filming on the sly (see: the 2006 Teen Choice Awards, where Shepard appeared in character unbeknownst to anyone) — became something slightly different than intended: a faux documentary about the tragicomic realities of getting a movie made in Hollywood.

Movieline spoke with Dax Shepard about blurring the lines between his real life, career, and friendships and the alternate versions of each that appear in the film, which features cameos by actor pals Tom Arnold, David Koechner, Bradley Cooper, Michael Rosenbaum, Jon Favreau, and Ashton Kutcher. One major off-screen force in his life, girlfriend Kristen Bell, doesn’t appear in Brother’s Justice — but, Shepard promises, she’s the star of his next film, a “Smokey and the Bandit“-type chase film called Outrun. And if both Shepard and Bell get their wish, they might just turn up in the film adaptation of their shared current obsession: Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games. Let’s get the campaign rolling, folks!

Take me back to the beginning when the idea for Brother’s Justice first came to you. How did you envision it as a film?
Well, originally I envisioned fighting Chuck Norris in the third act. That was our full goal, that I would fight him at the end of the movie. So we tried for months and months to get him; we tried every conceivable avenue, and ultimately he just had no interest in fighting me for the movie [Laughs] despite the fact that I promised that I’d be happy to lose.

So that letter you read from Norris turning you down in the film is real?
Yeah! That’s legit. I had emailed his manager and said, I will be in his workout video in exchange for, like, twenty minutes of his time and he didn’t bite. I don’t know if he thought it would be distracting to have me in the workout video or if I didn’t have enough build… who knows. I can’t get into his psychology.

His loss! So, you couldn’t get Chuck.
We had shot for a couple of months straight on and gotten all of our different actor friends involved, and then it became clear that we were not going to get him. So then we had to kind of change course and figure out what story we were going to tell if it wasn’t that one, and had to go back and retrofit a lot of stuff. We had these issues with an editor, this legal stuff, and a year and a half ended up going by from the time we were supposed to get Chuck Norris — but I think it ultimately ended up being a lucky thing that happened. It was helpful to the story at the end of the day.

What’s really fun about the film is how much your real life becomes blurred with the mockumentary element — it becomes clear at a certain point that there’s no way this can be real, but for a second you almost had me.
Good! I think when it gets really confusing is when all of a sudden I’m on a talk show doing a karate demonstration. I think you’re like, ‘Wait a minute…’ Because that is real, I really did go on a talk show without any explanation and just did a karate demonstration, and I also went to the Teen Choice Awards [in a karate gi] without any explanation. So a lot of it is real, but it gets kind of confusing.

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