Bridesmaids - Paul Feig interview

PAUL Feig talks about the making of Bridesmaids, striking the right balance between drama and gross out comedy, and why a comedy about women was a no-brainer. He also talks about his own career to date and how his relationship with producer Judd Apatow has evolved since Freaks & Geeks.

Q. Kristen Wiig co-wrote Bridesmaids after being encouraged to do so by Judd Apatow on the set of Knocked Up. So, at what point did you become involved to direct?
Paul Feig: Pretty soon after that, they did a table read of it and Judd called me up and said: “You should come.” Ever since Freaks & Geeks we’ve been trying to figure out something to do together again and could never quite settle on something, so he thought this might be something I might be good for. But he wasn’t really even offering it to me. So, went and watched it, really liked it and thought it was such a great vehicle for Kristen, who I’d just worked with on a Christmas movie called Unaccompanied Minors…

So, I’d always liked her and thought it was a great vehicle for her and then it went away, the way movies will do. I know they were working on it for a bit but I got busy with other stuff and Judd got busy with his stuff. But then it popped up at the beginning of last year. I still don’t know why it really did, other than the studio wanted to make a movie with Kristen and they love Judd. So, yeah, he called me up, I came on board, I talked to Kristen and she was cool with me doing it, so off we went.

Q. How collaborative was the process?
Paul Feig: It was very close. The hard thing for her was that she was doing Saturday Night Live in New York and we were all based in LA, but Annie Mumolo, her writing partner, was with us every day and we’d always keep Kristen up-to-date on everything we were doing and send stuff back and forth and she and Annie would liaise over the phone, or she’d fly in. But they’d get together. So, we all dove in. For Judd and I it was really just making sure that the story is really strong and the emotional story is tracking. We almost face it like it’s a drama in some ways and ask: “Where is the character now?”

But you need that to drive you forward and that’s what makes a good comedy. You have to be engaged with the characters because then you’ll go on the ride with them. And this is a tough ride on paper because it’s about a woman really kind of losing her mind and having a nervous breakdown and doing things that aren’t likeable at times, but you care about her because you know her history. She was successful one time, she had a bakery that kept her together until it fell apart because of the economy and it put her into a tailspin. But the fact that you’re so rooting for her to get back to who she was carries you through some of her more difficult times.

Q. But everything she’s doing is coming from the right place, no matter how misguided sometimes…
Paul Feig: Exactly, she’s well meaning, such as when she runs out on the cop the morning after they get together it’s a very awkward moment. You fear the audience won’t like her because of it, but then the very next scene is her on the phone calling her friend, saying I did this and it’s dumb, what’s wrong with me. It makes her redeemable. She’s just having a hard time.

Q. One of the standout sequences is the wedding dress scene. I gather you had a version that was even more outrageous?
Paul Feig: It went through a lot of phases that scene. Very quickly on we knew, and Judd was really hitting this hard, that just showing people vomiting and shitting is not that funny. It’s for shock value but we see it a lot. It gets done all the time. So, what’s funny about this is the circumstance leading up to it and how everyone is dealing with it. What’s funny is people who need to throw up and they’re pretending they’re fine and that it’s not happening. That’s the funny part because that’s the relatable part. And then also the comedy was in service of the story because this was telling an important point we needed to highlight – that one of Annie’s problems in life is that she can’t admit when she’s wrong and she makes mistakes that she won’t own up to.

She’s also competitive in a way she shouldn’t be. So, for us what’s funny is that she causes this problem by taking everybody to a crappy restaurant, because she doesn’t have money, and tries to pass it off like it’s a cool place. So, then when people start getting sick it’s the comedy of: “No, it wasn’t the restaurant! It’s not food poisoning. They must have the flu!” And then the outrageous comedy of it is how much can she deny what happened in the face of overwhelming evidence, so that we have fun with the overwhelming evidence of everyone throwing up all over the place. So, we shot more gross stuff knowing that we had to have everything for the editing room. So, we shot a lot of stuff knowing that we might not use any of it, or just flashes of it. And one thing none of us is going to do is put out anything that doesn’t work.

So, through our testing process with audiences, we start with a longer version of the throwing up and the mayhem in the bathroom, and you could feel it was ‘killing, killing’ but then we went too far. So, then we’d do one where we pulled it way back and felt the audience was ready for a little more. The math of that leads you to the right mix and what’s interesting is that you don’t really see that much in these scenes. You see the initial blast when the first girl runs in and throws up, but then after that everything else is implied and there’s no funny sound effects. It’s the comedy of how somebody is dealing with it. How does Megan solve her problem? What happens to Maya [Rudolph] when she’s having to run across the street?

Q. So, it’s probably the most sophisticated shitting and vomiting scene in screen history?
Paul Feig: [Laughs aloud] Exactly! As if Noel Coward had done it!

Q. It seems like a no-brainer now given the overwhelming success of the film in the States but was there any persuading needed with the studio to do such a female-driven comedy?
Paul Feig: Fortunately not. I know that Donna Langley, who runs Universal, was very, very supportive of it. I think she might even have been a driver behind just wanting to have a woman’s comedy out there. And you don’t have to twist my arm for that. So many of my friends have always been women growing up… I always feel slightly more comfortable around women because with guys in general there’s always more of a danger zone… it’s very aggressive sometimes the way guys act with each other, putting each other down and calling each other names, so I was always too sensitive for that and used to hang out with the girls. And they were always really funny to me.

But then you wouldn’t see that portrayed in movies honestly. Either they’d force women to act like guys and be that aggressive thing, and I didn’t enjoy that because it didn’t feel real, or else women get stuck in these roles of the girlfriend who is mean, or the wife who’s a drag and it’s like… you know, some very funny people get stuck in those roles and you’re like: “Why aren’t the being funny? Why are they just making them become a jerk?” So, it was really nice to just be able to go: “We can do this honestly.” And the studio was always behind it.

The only thing Donna said to me, very smartly was: “Please don’t let it be crude!” But I completely got that because I didn’t want that either. Honestly, when we shot it we decided to just shoot PG-13 versions of everything, so that we could avoid doing it as an R-rated movie or a restricted film. But very quickly it just naturally became R-rated because we were letting the women improv a lot and talk the way they would normally. They would talk in a very bawdy way that felt very natural and real… almost like stuff that guys don’t get to see behind-the-scenes from women. So then we never even ended up cutting a clean version of the movie because it wouldn’t have felt honest.

Q. So how important is improv to that process and how much, as director, do you have to keep it under control?
Paul Feig: It’s very important but here’s the thing – we never just show up on set and go: “Let’s just see what happens!” We have a very strong script, which is a very strong blueprint of the emotional journey of the whole thing. So, when you go into a scene it’s never like: “Let’s just go nuts!” It’s more like: “Here’s what we need out of the scene. This is the scene where you discover you don’t like her, or we have to find out this thing about you.” So, the script is written, it’s in really good shape, we cast early on and then we bring all the cast into the rehearsal process, which becomes part of the writing process for us, because they’ll read the script and rehearse it a bit and then we’ll let them play with it. After that, we’ll just kind of improv things like “tell her about your family” or “tell her about your husband” and so they’ll just start improve-ing as the character, and they’ll start to discover the character inside them and we start to discover what’s coming out of them and it gives us ideas.

For instance, ‘OK, she’s going to have the husband who wants to have sex all the time’, or ‘she’s on painkillers all the time, or mind-altering meds’. So, we play around with that a bit and by the time we’re done, we’re putting that into the script and doing the process again and again. We’re also writing down all these jokes we’re hearing from them, or things that make us laugh, so by the time we get to the set the scene is in a really good shape, where it’s natural for the girls, and we have all these alternate jokes that we can throw in. And then on top of that, it’s like dealer’s choice where we let them do their thing and then I’m thinking of stuff and other people are thinking of stuff. So, in that way, you quickly amass a wealth of material that you then have to sort out in the editing room. And we’re lucky we have these great editors who’ve done this before. They did Superbad, Get Him To The Greek, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, which are done in this way also. But they build it from the emotional story up too. They cut it like a drama first to make sure that’s working and then we start going in and dealing with the comedy.

Q. What made you look to Britain for a couple of the key roles such as Chris O’Dowd and Matt Lucas?
Paul Feig: I’m just an enormous British comedy fan. Little Britain… ever since it first came on… I come here a lot, we have a lot of friends here, my wife used to work with a lot of Brits, so we were always keyed into the hot shows when they first came out. So, I fell in love with Little Britain way back when and heard that Matt was kind of wanting to do something possibly in one of Judd’s movies, and so immediately tried to figure out something for him to do. And when Rebel Wilson came in to audition for one of the bridesmaids she was so funny, but I remember thinking: “She could be Matt’s sister…” So, that literally came out of that – the roommates’ part was a completely different role before that. It was just such a funny resource to have.

And then with Chris O’Dowd, I was just such a huge fan of The IT Crowd, so when he came in – and I didn’t know he was coming in, he’d just been in town because he’d done Gulliver’s Travels – I lost my mind because I was a fan. But no one else in the room knew The IT Crowd. So, Chris auditioned with an American accent, just because most Brits end up having to do that in our country for some reason, and I was like: “Hey, use your real accent because I just want to see the character as you…” And the chemistry between him and Kristen was so amazingly fast and just real that she was like: “Oh my God, I love this guy!” So, it became a real no-brainer. For me, I just want funny people, so I don’t care where they’re from and I don’t feel that a story needs to justify why some Brits are living in the Midwest. I grew up in the Midwest and there were British people around, who were ex-pats or whatever. The world’s a melting pot…

Q. You mention your love of British TV, so I’d imagine you were a fan of the British version of The Office. So, were you initially sceptical of the American remake?
Paul Feig: Very much so! Oh yeah!

Q. And then you ended up directing quite a few episodes…
Paul Feig: Oh totally! I was definitely among the ones saying: “Don’t do that! You’re going to ruin it!” But then I also was a huge fan of Steve Carell’s because he was on The Daily Show for years, our fake news show, and he was always so funny. So, to me when they announced that he was going to do the role it was a total no-brainer. I was like: “Well, of course, he’s one of the funniest guys in the world.” But then I’d heard behind the scenes that it took so long to find him and cast him and come to the realisation that he was the right one for it. So, I was very sceptical and honestly didn’t see a bunch of episodes from the first season. They only did six for that and when my agent said they wanted me to direct some, I was like: “I don’t know if I want to work on that show!”

So, they sent me the first six and actually they were really funny. They shot the pilot word for word from the original one but then they started writing their own after that and I thought immediately that it was fun. Then it was just about humanising Steve’s character more than the David Brent character, because American audiences just won’t put up with a character as hilariously unlikeable as David Brent is. And that’s why I think he wasn’t connecting with people [in the US] despite the fact that it had this history of being this beloved show that was being remade. But it was because of The 40-Year-Old Virgin coming out in between those two seasons that people started to love Steve so much that it took off and we started analysing Steve’s qualities a bit. So, we added a little bit of redemption to Michael Scott.

Q. So, what was it like directing Steve’s final episodes?
Paul Feig: It was crazy. It was very emotional. It was a monumental event because he took a famous character and really made it his own and made it one of the most successful and beloved characters of American television history. So, Greg Daniels who produced and turned the American one into what it is wrote it and we were all very emotional. But we had to realise that we can’t let that emotion come across too much in the whole episode because Michael Scott leaving Dunder Mifflin is a very different emotional event from Steve Carell leaving the cast of The Office, and so it was like: “People at Dunder Mifflin wouldn’t be weepy that Michael Scott is leaving.” They like him but they’ve had enough bad encounters with him that some would care and some wouldn’t. So, we were really saving it [the emotion] up for when Jim says goodbye to him, or when Dwight says goodbye… the people who were really close with him – Pam obviously. So, it was a fun mix to hit but it was tough.

Q. Will you continue to direct the show moving forward?
Paul Feig: I’m not sure, I’m not sure. I’m hoping to be so busy doing more movies that… but I loved doing it because they’re all my friends over there. It’s just the greatest cast. So, I’m not sure.

Q. You were also involved in the second season of Nurse Jackie…
Paul Feig: Oh, I love that. It’s such a great show.

Q. Under-rated as well…
Paul Feig: It really is! People who know it, love it, but people don’t come to it naturally, which is ridiculous, because there’s so many things out there. But I just love it. I was lucky enough to do two late in the first season and they liked me enough to bring me on to the second season and I ended up being a co-exec producer. I directed eight of the 12 episodes. I think that hasn’t been done that often – I did six episodes in a row for the last six, which was really quite challenging. But so much fun because Edie Falco is a dream, an absolute dream to work with. But the whole cast is too.

Q. Going back a little bit further to Freaks & Geeks – could that ever be revived?
Paul Feig: I don’t know. People have brought it up in the past, but I almost feel like I’m a chicken. I feel like it kind of came out so well that I’m afraid of doing something to screw up the memory of it. I find that so many times when somebody tries to go back in, it sort of isn’t as good and you wish they hadn’t done it. But if I or Judd had this genius idea for it, then I think we’d jump back in. But it’s unlikely. Plus, we couldn’t afford the cast now! They’re all too big [laughs].

Q. How has your friendship with Judd evolved since you worked on that?
Paul Feig: Oh it’s great. He and I are so close and we kind of feel that we have a brother’s relationship where sometimes it’s good and sometimes it’s bad. We were stand-ups together. I’ve known him since he was probably 17-years-old and we just bonded very early on back then. We had a very similar sense of humour and a very similar take on the world and how stories should be told and the characters that stories should be about. So, it was great. He used to send me scripts when he was beginning to produce things and he likes to get feedback from a lot of people and I was one of his more interested feedback people, which was very nice.

And then I worked with him as an actor when he did Heavyweights. He produced that movie and he put me in it, which was really fun. And then Freaks was the first time we really worked together on that level and he made that show happen. It was something I wrote as a spec pilot and thought it was going to be the kind of thing he would like to do. He’d seen a low budge feature I’d made a year before that he really liked and said: “Hey, if you ever have something that I might want to produce for TV, I’ve got this deal with DreamWorks…” And so when I sent it to him within 12 hours he’d turned around and responded saying he wanted to buy it.

So, it was heartening to see that we were in sync in that way. But it was a real difficult-fun process doing Freaks & Geeks because we were trying to make it so good and doing something in a tone that really wasn’t being done on TV that much. I mean Ally McBeal was sort of the closest thing I can think of to kind of being a comedy-drama but that had its own kind of style that meant it got kind of big sometimes. But it was a great show. And so, you don’t want to say you’re ahead of your time, or whatever, because that sounds too high falootin’, but I think we came on at the wrong time. Game shows were huge. It was when Who Wants To Be A Millionaire just swept America and took over. You couldn’t beat it. And so everyone just decided it was cheaper and you got better ratings doing game shows and we got cancelled for a game show. Sometimes I can’t believe they let us make 18 episodes, so I’m just thankful they let us make what we did!

Q. Is there a danger that we could see a repeat of that type of thing on American TV now, what with so many reality shows?
Paul Feig: No, the good thing now is that I really think that American television is in kind of a second golden age. Even though there’s a lot of reality and all those contest shows, which aren’t my kind of shows, the scripted stuff that’s going on is so good right now because of basic cable. Everyone has stepped it up and realised that people like quality. And so the amount of stuff that is great on television is extremely high these days. I don’t have a lot of patience now for anyone who says TV is rubbish or a poor relation. That’s like an old fashioned view of television. I mean, there is plenty of crap but with 500 channels there’s always going to be crap! But if you look at the ratio it’s unbelievable how high it is.

Q. How do you decide what you’re going to do next?
Paul Feig: It’s just whatever stories excite me. There’s so many stories I want to tell and even more than stories I want to tell, there’s people and characters that I want to tell stories about. The thrilling thing about Bridesmaids is that there’s a bunch of women now that I would love to do movies about and for. I actually just sold a project to Universal that is probably going to be a vehicle for a couple of people from Bridesmaids.

Judd is going to produce, so I’m really excited about that. But then there’s other projects that have popped up that people can’t believe I want to do – either because I just respond to something in them, or I can see something I want do to with them because I can see it tells a story that I like about people that I like and care about. Really, all I care about is trying to do things, in general, about characters that don’t normally get movies made about them. I mean that’s how Bridesmaids, weirdly, came about. It’s silly really that it should be a big stand to make a movie about women but there’s just not enough of them. So, it was like: “Good, let’s try and re-invent, or invent, this genre.”

Q. And the box office success must be a nice vindication of that policy?
Paul Feig: It’s such a big relief. Honestly, I felt going into it so much personal pressure because if I screwed this up all I was doing was screwing over all these funny women of the world. Hollywood was maybe saying: “Movies starring you guys won’t work.” So I thought: “If I pull this off, it would be great!” It was a team effort, obviously, but as director you can always screw everything up! And so it’s so heartening that it did so well in the States and that it’s getting such good reviews all over the world. That’s really nice.

COMMENTS

Yeah right, this film is simply gorgeous, I advise everyone to see it if someone else did it. you will have mass, just a mass of beautiful associations and impressions. I recommend …

kelvin    Jun 25    #

Fantastic interview. Loved this film, love Mr Feig and all he’s directed, and think Kristen Wiig is a huge talent to watch!!

Jen    Jun 27    #