“The Naked Gun” Writer/Director Akiva Schaffer’s Dead Serious Mission to Resurrect the Spoof Comedy
The Naked Gun director Akiva Schaffer is on a quest to bring people back to the movie theaters to laugh—hysterically, if he’s done his job right—and, while he’s at it, to bring the filmmaking process back to Los Angeles as much as possible.
His franchise revival stars Liam Neeson as Detective Frank Drebin Jr., the son of Leslie Nielsen’s iconic Police Squad cop, tasked with solving a murder and saving his department from shutting down. The cast also includes Pamela Anderson (who is coming in for rave reviews), Paul Walter Hauser, and Danny Huston.
Here, Schaffer explains why screening on the Paramount Studios lot is a big deal, shooting Atlanta for LA, and why he insisted on practical effects over VFX whenever possible.
The first official screening of The Naked Gun took place at the iconic Paramount Theatre on the Paramount Studios lot. How was that?
I had never set foot in that theater before, even though I made Hot Rod for Paramount back in 2007, and this. We screened The Naked Gun for friends and family to work out jokes and figure out what plays well, but we would be in the smaller Sherry Lansing Theatre. I only saw the main one from the outside. I was blown away, just on a technical level, by how great it looked and sounded, and how big and comfortable the seats are. It’s a beautiful theater, and it was also nice that the experience got saved. Other than in a little theater at Deluxe when I was approving it, that was the first screening where it was color corrected, sound mixed, had the score, was locked, and on DCP. I’m also a sucker for old Hollywood. I used to work at SNL, and we wrote Hot Rod in Lorne Michaels’ office on the Paramount lot. It was one of the bungalows right off the courtyard. I believe it was Paul Hogan’s before it was Lorne’s. We’d be at SNL in NY, and Lorne would be wanting us to take it seriously, so he’d say, “Fly to LA on the off week and write Hot Rod at the bungalow.”
Seeing The Naked Gun with an audience and laughing alongside of strangers reminds us of the value of comedies securing theatrical releases. However, people have to turn out.
The big question is, ‘Will they?’ There haven’t been that many comedies attempted at a big studio level recently, so with each one it’s like, ‘Does this still work?’ Earlier this year, One of Them Days with Keke Palmer and SZA was a hit, so I don’t want to erase that film’s success. There are certainly no spoof comedies, though. This is a dead genre. I agree that it’s amazing to be in a room full of people laughing, but I’m hearing the laughs differently than you are. I’m analyzing them. What I found interesting about the Paramount lot was the real sound mix, which I’m very proud of because it sounds incredible. Lorne Balfe’s score sounds legit, and it feels like you’re watching Mission: Impossible.
The Naked Gun is set in Los Angeles, but you filmed it in Atlanta. Was the decision influenced by tax credits?
I was holding onto LA with my fingernails, being dragged, no offense, to Atlanta. My kids are in school here, and I love LA. I managed to get Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers to have the LA tax credit, so I shot it here. As producers, we managed to do it in Palm Springs. With no tax credit, we managed to talk Universal into letting us shoot Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping here, because we wanted to get all the cameos. We were like, “If we’re anywhere else, we’ll never get them. We’re not paying anybody, and there are like 50 cameos in the movie from very famous, busy people.” You’re not getting Ringo Starr to come by your set in Atlanta. I’ve been lucky to shoot in LA a ton, much more than almost every one of my friends in this business, but here we go with a movie that is LA to its core, and it was a little sad to be like, “Oh, we’re going to have to figure out how to fake it.” We were lucky enough to come back to LA and shoot a lot of our exterior stuff here, like the final fight. That’s all shot where it’s supposed to be. We also did a lot of the driving stuff.
If The Naked Gun is a hit, would you push to make the sequel here?
Of course. There were various things where we were going to shoot exterior, but couldn’t. Atlanta can double for a lot of places, such as New York, but LA is not one of them. It’d be nice to have the freedom to go wherever you want. On Popstar, which is very loosey-goosey because it was shot documentary style, it was so rad to, at any moment, go, ‘Well, we’ll just step outside.’ Every location looked like the right location.
Let’s talk about casting Liam Neeson, who is absolutely perfect as Frank Drebin Jr.
His casting predates me, but it’s the reason I said yes to doing it. Seth MacFarlane and Liam were on Ted 2 because Liam has a really funny cameo, and they were talking about their mutual love of ZAZ – Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker. Seth was like, “You’d be a great Frank Drebin if we ever rebooted. Can I run with that?” and Liam agreed. Seth went to Paramount, years passed, there were two other attempts, but it wasn’t working, and then I got the call from Erica Huggins, who works for Seth at Fuzzy Door, and Paramount. If they had come to me asking for my thoughts on Naked Gun, I’d have said, “It’s a perfect movie. No one should touch it.” I would have the same pessimism that an audience of a certain age who remember and love Naked Gun have, which is, “What’s the next one they’re going to ruin? Oh, it’s Naked Gun.” I don’t blame anybody for those feelings. The second thing is the morbid curiosity. I did a Google search, saw Liam might be attached, and when they confirmed it, I could visualize a whole new thing, down to how I would want to shoot it, what I wanted the music to be, and how I’d want him to play it. It was also my way of seeing how it would not be a rip-off, rehash, or a nostalgia thing, but we could pay respects and lean into what this is and the last 30 years of spy movies, action movies, police procedurals, and all the stuff. The movie is a pretty fair representation of the goal from that first conversation.
Is it true that Paul Walter Hauser called you at the offices of SNL to chat with you and Andy Samberg?
Yeah. He told me that, and I have vague memories of it happening, but not knowing it was him. As someone who grew up in the Bay Area with zero connections to showbiz, it all felt so far away and impenetrable, and then you get here. At one point, I think I found it at a thrift store, or maybe somebody’s boss had it, but we managed to get hold of a UTA sweatshirt. We would wear it around, being like, “I’m signed to an agency.” Even living in LA, it felt so far away. The fact that you can pick up a phone and call CAA, UTA, or whatever and get them on the phone is wild. Some kids realized they could call the switchboard at 30 Rock and go, Saturday Night Live please,” then some 20-year-old who works the phones would answer “SNL,” and the caller would be like, “Put me through to Akiva Schaffer, please.” All of a sudden, a phone’s ringing in our office, and they’re patched through. He wasn’t the only one who did it. We would think that if they’re motivated and clever enough to get to me, we would always try to tolerate it. We weren’t like, “You can’t call here,” but more like, “Yeah, what’s up?”
There are so many sight gags in The Naked Gun. Were any of them particularly challenging?
I had a big meeting right at the beginning where I said, “Let’s do everything practical. If there’s ever an option between VFX and practical, it’s always practical, because it’s so much funnier if you know it really happened.” One example that’s in the trailer is when Frank drives the electric car away. It’s still plugged in, so all the chargers get ripped out. Then, it goes up the wall to the transformer, ripping out the bricks. All of a sudden, you realize it’s the side of their prison, and all the criminals are escaping. There isn’t a VFX shot in that, not even a wire cleanup, and we did two takes. After we did the first one, we reset, came back, and did one take the next day, then moved on.
The Naked Gun is in theaters now.
Featured image: Director Akiva Schaffer, Liam Neeson and Paul Walter Hauser on the set of The Naked Gun from Paramount Pictures.
