Exclusive Interview: Paul Feig on The Heat

CraveOnline: I was watching the deleted scenes and the alternate takes, and a lot of them are really funny. When you have all these different versions of the same scene, is editing a nightmare?

Paul Feig: Well, that’s why I rely so heavily on the test screenings. We love everything, so it’s very easy to “just keep that in.” But at the end of the day, first and foremost, we are telling a story, and we’re trying to tell it in the most effective and emotional way. You quickly realize as you go into the test screening process, all these things are funny but they add up to being too much and they start to hurt the storytelling. We had a bunch of scenes, one in the car, where [Ashburn] is giving [Mullins] the test “Two Truths and a Lie,” trying to figure her out. And there’s a scene where they try to plant the microphone on LeSoire, they’re talking about how much Ashburn used to get beat up in high school and peeing in her Coke, her Dr. Pepper. But then we have the yearbook scene in her house, and we always liked the yearbook scene but we also liked the other ones. We realized those other ones were hurting the yearbook scene because you were getting the same information over and over again. So we went over it and said which is our favorite and what gets the biggest laughs? The biggest laughs always came out of the yearbook scene, and it also felt like the right place for it. I wanted them to go through more adventures before they started to bond. You just have to let the story kick out the babies that you love.

 

What if it has nothing to do with the story? What if it’s just the delivery or the punchline to one joke, and you have 15-20 good ad libs from Melissa McCarthy?

You’ve got to be brutal about it. The term “kill your babies” is so apropos in comedy because there’s so many funny lines, but again, if I’m going to jam in a joke or something that’s going to hurt the rhythm or… In editing, we always say if there’s a problem with something you’re watching at the moment, there’s as good a chance that the problem is not with the thing you’re watching, it’s with the thing that happened ten minutes before that thing. Because you took too long to do something, so people are like, “Oh I’ve seen that beat,” or “Now it feels long.” Suddenly they’re obsessed with “is this going slowly” right when you’re hitting the point they should be excited about, so you really have to be brutal about it. And also, doing the test screenings… We do test screenings every two weeks starting two weeks into my director’s cut, so it’s very easy not to fall in love with things, and go “Let’s try this,” “Let’s try that.” If something doesn’t get a big laugh we’ll take it out. You’d rather have something not get a laugh at all than a semi-laugh. Audiences don’t like when you go, “I know that was a joke, but it wasn’t very funny” vs. “Okay, I’m just getting information. I’m watching the movie.” But a swing and a dribble to first does not do you any good. You need to put all triples and home runs into the movie.

 

Your films are structured but you leave a lot of room for the characters to breathe and just interact and be funny. That seems to lead to comedies, as a whole, getting longer than they used to be.

Yeah.

 

Do you think that’s a problem? Some people are critical of it.

No. I think people are critical of it. I think it’s a problem only if you’re watching a comedy and you’re looking at your watching and going, “Jesus Christ, when is this thing going to be over?” [Laughs] But that’s, again, why we’re so reliant on the test screening process. Because I mean look, in a perfect world every comedy would be only 90 minutes long, but at the same time now we’re in a world where the comedy I love the most, and what I’ve always done, is behavioral comedy. Behavioral comedy is not just set up joke and set up joke.

That’s a whole different type of thing, which I am afraid of, because I think you’re only as good as your jokes so you’ve got to have really killer stuff and it’s just hard to sustain that, versus, basically, you have to make the characters in the movie friends of the audience. So then they go, “Oh, it’s so funny when they do this,” and “Oh, I love when they talk about this,” or “What a surprise that they did this because I know that they don’t normally do something like that.” So to do that you really have to spend a little time with these characters, but that said you never want to be a boring time. So for us it’s just going “What is going to be truly entertaining?”

People will always say a movie is too long, no matter what, but if the majority of the people are with it… We’re always asking, “Does this feel right? Is it too long? Is it too short?” When we get towards the end of the process, 95% say it felt just right, but somebody’s always going to complain that a movie’s too long.

 

You recorded a lot of intros for the Blu-ray. Have you had a long-standing fantasy of being a PBS host?

[Laughs] Well, I certainly was living out the dream in front of that fireplace. You know, I was an actor and a stand-up comedian for so many years that I love doing it. I find it very fun. So these moments are a good chance to put myself on there and do something stupid. [Laughs]

 

Would you be involved in a Heat sequel if that gets off the ground?

Oh yeah. Katie Dippold has already written a first draft of it, and it’s really funny. It’s an idea that she and I had and it’s great. I think it’s a great sequel because it’s not just… You know, most sequels are like, whatever people liked in the first one let’s just do it ten times bigger. This has a very different story and it’s very funny. Who knows if we’re ever going to make it, but…

 

Sandra Bullock said recently something about not being sure.

Her whole thing is that she’s made two sequels and they’ve been terrible, and well, I don’t disagree with that. [Laughs] But at the same time, I’d like to think that people on my team, between myself and Katie and great producers and the actors that I work with, we’re pretty good at what we do. We’re not going to do something that is not as good or better than the original one. If we were gonna, we wouldn’t do it. We’re all in the game of keeping our reputations good.

 

Do you think the franchise could continue without her, with every film teaming Melissa McCarthy with another actor? “In this The Heat, she’s with Meryl Streep!”

I know, exactly. It would be very sad to me for that to be the case because I think the chemistry between the two of them is just through the roof, but who knows? [Laughs] I love the franchise so much, but I love both characters. I just think there’s more fun to be had with them now that everybody knows and likes those characters. I’ve never been a sequel mania guy, because there are terrible sequels and those sequels don’t live up to the standard [of the original]. But if you can pull off the one that does, and there’s a lot of energy behind it, then I think that’s great. The idea that Katie and I came up with I really like, and this draft made me laugh.


William Bibbiani is the editor of CraveOnline’s Film Channel and co-host of The B-Movies Podcast. Follow him on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.

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