How “The Naked Gun” Writers Dan Gregor & Doug Mand Got Liam Neeson & Pamela Anderson to Embrace Absurdity
Macho cop teams with gorgeous mystery woman to stop evil tech mogul from destroying the world: The plot’s perfectly functional for an action-thriller, but it’s the jokes, not the story, that have pushed The Naked Gun to the biggest action comedy opening of 2025. Writers Dan Gregor and Doug Mand (Crazy Ex-Girlfriend), working with director/co-writer Akiva Schaffer, furnished stars Liam Neeson and Pamela Anderson with a firehose of silliness encompassing sight gags, puns, bawdy banter, tone-deaf interrogation scenes, and ludicrous fight sequences spoofing three decades’ worth of action movie cliches.
Mand, who previously worked with Gregor and Schaffer on Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers, says, “The whole name of this movie is, find a trope, make fun of the trope.”
Rebooting the original 1988 Naked Gun from David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker, Neeson plays the son of Leslie Nielsen’s famously accident-prone L.A. cop Frank Drebin, with Anderson, Danny Huston, and Paul Walter Hauser rounding out the cast.
Speaking from their offices in Los Angeles, Gregor and Mand unpack the joke-writing process that gave rise to a magical owl, a sexy snowman, Neeson’s 10-year-old schoolgirl disguise, and Anderson’s nickname Cherry Roosevelt Fat Bozo Chewing Spaghetti.
Not to get all fancy, but what you’ve done in The Naked Gun brings to mind the 1941 Preston Sturges movie Sullivan’s Travel about a director who wants to give up comedy and start making socially significant message films only to realize, when he sees regular folks laughing in theaters, that goofy slapstick also serves a valuable purpose, especially during hard times.
Gregor: What does that have to do with what we’re doing? We’re making a drama, Hugh, we’ve made a very serious cop drama.
Well, it just seems that people could use a good laugh right about now, and based on the reactions to The Naked Gun, mission accomplished.
Gregor: Thank you.
The sheer volume of jokes in The Naked Gun is something to behold. What was the process behind generating this volume of comedy?
Gregor: We met at Akiva’s office every day for months. First of all, we had to make sure the story was good enough so that the plot makes sense and you care about the characters. The more people think, “Oh, the story’s whatever,” that makes me feel great, because that means we did our job and left all this room for the comedy to shine. But if the story’s no good, then the comedy also suffers.
Mand: Once we made sure the story was right, we pitched jokes, scenes, and set pieces, and then wrote and rewrote them. We had a writer’s assistant named Melissa Aron, so she’d take down notes and pitch ideas herself. We wanted it to feel like a writer’s room.
So you have the script on paper. Then you show up on set and…
Mand: The benefit of having Liam Neeson is that he is such a good actor that every first take was pretty much perfect. We didn’t have to do the scene over and over, so now we could try different things. We would feed Liam different lines and he would look at us like we were psychotic: “What the hell is even coming out of your mouth?” He’d proceed to say the line, the crew would laugh, and he’d say, “I guess it was good.” Some of those really weird jokes that we’d written, they’d yell cut, and he’d say [gruff Liam Neeson imitation] “I’m Oscar Schindler, damn it, what’s happened to me!”
Neeson makes his entrance disguised as a schoolgirl in order to stop a bank robbery. As an actor best known for playing an ass-kicking vigilante in the Taken movies, seeing him about to fight in a little plaid dress feels like quite the departure. How did you come up with that bit?
Mand: It’s actually from Taken, when Liam’s character infiltrates this whole party of bad guys. We had this idea of “What’s the stupidest way that Frank could infiltrate our bank heist? And then when he pulls off the [little girl] mask [to reveal himself], that’s from Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible.
When Frank introduces Danny Huston’s villainous Richard Cane to Pam’s character Beth, he makes up a fake name on the spot. Looking around the club, he sees a cocktail and a painting on the wall, so she’s “Cherry Roosevelt…
Mand: Fat bozo chowing spaghetti.
And from then on, Beth is known to the bad guy as Cherry Roosevelt Fat Bozo Chowing Spaghetti. Besides the Femme Fatale tradition, how did you figure out what to make fun of?
Mand: The original Naked Gun was building off their Police Squad [TV comedy], which was building off tropes from fifties and sixties TV procedurals like Dragnet. That meant we had 30 years of new material to spoof with all the action and detective movies that have happened in the interim since the last Naked Gun.
Gregor: First and foremost, we sat down and watched the Bonds, the Mission Impossibles…
Mand: John Wick.
Gregor: John Wick, especially. When you watch those fight scenes, you go, “This is impossible. We have to use this!” Nonsensical physics in fight scenes is new because of CGI and advances in the stunt community which have created a whole new template for what stunts can look like.
Which would explain how Liam Newsom at one point literally rips the limbs off the bad guy…
Mand: Two arms.
And then start beating the man with his own dismembered arms?
Mand: You are correct. You did not imagine that.
What’s the deal with Frank constantly being handed cups of coffee?
Gregor: You see it in probably half of the Law & Order cold opens when the detectives show up [at a crime scene] and they get handed coffee. We had the idea of giving Frank bigger and bigger cups of coffee, and then someone hands Frank coffee through the window of his car while he’s driving on the Pacific Coast Highway. We came up with that on set, kind of a nod to green screen driving, when it used to be obvious that they were just moving backgrounds and bumping the car up and down.
Mand: It’s a nod to the ridiculousness that he’s not really driving a car, and the physics of him getting coffee through the window while he’s driving only heightened the joke. That hand, I believe, belonged to our prop master. I remember when we filmed the driving coffee cup, people on set were going, “Oh my god, that is so stupid.”
Gregor: Which is exactly what you want to hear.
Pamela Anderson’s scat singing becomes truly deranged when she takes the stage at the villain’s nightclub. We expect Beth to perform some kind of sexy torch song, but instead, she unleashes bebop pandemonium. Where did that come from?
Man: When Akiva first met Pam, he learned that she’d been in a scat jazz band in like eighth grade, and he thought that was amazing. So from there, it was just about different iterations of how far we can go from Beth being sultry to completely unhinged.
Speaking of unhinged, please explain the hilariously weird montage when Frank and Beth build a sexy snowman during their romantic getaway to the tune of the power ballad “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now.”
Gregor: The original Naked Gun has this iconic full-body condom montage, and we knew we could not beat that, so we had to do something very different. We started talking about doing a horror interlude. Akiva went home that night and had this dream, came back the next day, and, pretty much verbatim, that’s what you see in the movie. It came whole cloth out of Akiva’s brain in a bit of sleep.
How did you react when Akiva told you his idea?
Mand: Gregor and I just looked at him: “Yep.” Sometimes that’s the gift of having a partner.
SPOILER ALERT
Toward the end of the movie, an owl channeling the spirit of Frank’s dead father carries him through the air to help save the day. How did you dream up that flight of fancy?
Mand: We got a studio note about wanting us to dig into the “emotions” and make this relationship between Frank and his father more heartfelt and central to the story. We thought, eh, it’s belabored and exhausting to us. So honestly, the owl was our way of dressing up what felt like a relatively unhelpful studio note: Let’s make fun of it.
Gregor: We had a lot of fun playing with that bit until you realize you have to hire an actual owl, and then your life becomes terrible from dealing with real birds.
Featured image: Liam Neeson plays Frank Drebin Jr. and Pamela Anderson plays Beth Davenport in The Naked Gun from Paramount Pictures.
