Paul Feig Brings The Heat

Published by Interrobang Staff at December 8, 2013

Director Paul Feig had a cult following for his 80’s TV series “Freaks and Geeks” long before he became known as one of the top comedy film directors working today. His two most recent films, “Bridesmaids” and “The Heat” have been huge box office hits. Paul sat down with Ron Bennington in the SiriusXM studios recently, to talk about his career. A few excerpts from the interview appear below. You can hear the interview in its entirety exclusively on SiriusXM.

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Paul Feig Talks About Comedy Budgets

Ron Bennington: I think sometimes one of the worst things you can do for a comedy director is give them a giant budget. There are so many big comedies that fail because they become about, “Oh look at all the shit we can do.”

Paul Feig: That’s totally it. And you do get enamored with, “oh my God, we can…” so you really lose that thread. I 100% agree. I’m a big fan of rules. I like thinking, “ok, you’ve got a bus, and a thing, and this, now come up with a story for that.” That’s fun.

Ron Bennington: So you want something tight for you to then be able to work yourself out of, like a puzzle.

Paul Feig: Yeah, totally. When I write things I really try to box myself into a corner, because then you go, “How do I get out of this?” That’s what I love in movies, where I’m going, “I don’t know how they are going to get out of this.” When it falls apart, sometimes, is when they get out of it in a way where you’re going, “Well, that was dumb.” But, if you can really challenge yourself as a writer and put yourself in a corner and go, “What’s the craziest way I can get out of this?” And you do it successfully, then the audience is in the palm of your hand.

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Paul Feig Talks About Test Screening His Movies

Ron Bennington: You’re also one of the first directors I’ve ever heard talk about loving to show unfinished work to an audience to see where it’s at. What we’re supposed to believe is that it’s the studio ruining everything, but you want to find out where the audience is.

Paul Feig: Oh no, totally. Especially if you’re doing big commercial comedy, you have to. You can’t be precious about it. What happens is, there is a thing – the Directors Guild is very, very kind, they want to give you ten weeks as a director to be able to do your cut before anybody else gets involved: the studio, the producers, and all that. But, what happens when you do that is that you fall in love with what you’ve cut over those ten weeks. So, you’re so in love with every moment, so when they make you do a test screening, you’re just sitting there saying, “Ohh no, don’t hate this.” And you hate the audience because, “Fuck those people, they don’t know; they don’t get it,” and it’s dangerous. So, two weeks in I say put it in front of an audience, let’s see what works. Then it’s very easy to go, “That didn’t work, put this in.” You can’t be precious. You die if you’re precious.

Ron Bennington: I think we talked about this, that’s what a stand up does when he’s touring, before he gets to do a special, he’s already edited that special many, many times in front of a live audience.

Paul Feig: Yeah, it’s the exact same process. And Judd Apatow and myself, we both came up through standup together and he’s the one that really started doing this, to this extent, in movies and working with him I took the technique and ran with it, too. It’s just the way to do it. Comedy is so fluid and people will tell you what is funny. I can sit there and lecture people all day long about what is funny. If they don’t laugh at what I say is funny, then I’m just full of shit.

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Paul Feig Talks About Working With Women

Ron Bennington: I notice now, when people write about you it’s about women. Before, it was the geek, the outsider, but it’s so funny how quickly we want to put a sign on somebody and say, “This is what he does.”

Paul Feig: I don’t mind. Women had become the geeks and outsiders of the movie world, so to me it’s not that different. I’m just more interested in who isn’t getting their story told? Nerds and stuff for a long time weren’t and now women are just completely under served in comedy and continue to be. We’re the only movie [The Heat] that came out this summer that had two women in lead roles.

Ron Bennington: And you guys did gigantic business, following up “Bridesmaids” which did gigantic business, so there is an audience there.

Paul Feig: Yeah, they are half the population of the planet. I’m told even more than half the population of the planet.

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Paul Feig Talks About Melissa McCarthy

Ron Bennington: What is it about Melissa [McCarthy], because she’s amazing on screen?

Paul Feig: You know what, she is just inventive. She is a free spirit, but she’s also very, very concerned about making sure the character is three dimensional, lives and breaths in this actual world and that grounds everything. Because when somebody is just nuts, it’s fun, but you get tired of it after awhile. You kind of go, I want to know who that person is, but if you know who that person is then you can enjoy their struggles, they are like one of your friends. Your friends are funny to you because you know what they like, what they don’t like. So, when something happens to them that is completely out of the ordinary, you laugh with them.

Ron Bennington: I think it’s so funny that she will get laughs on pretty much straight dramatic lines. She’ll do a line like, “I will beat your ass right here,” and the place roars.

Paul Feig: Oh totally. In “The Heat”, one of my favorite moments – spoiler alert: when her brother gets shot and is in the hospital in a coma, she’s very tearfully telling how he was trying to get his life together and had a résumé and it was terrible. He put prison on it, and he listed under special skills, “keeping it real,” and it gets this huge laugh. She’s playing it completely seriously.

Ron Bennington: So why is it, how does that happen? We buy into her? She’s already set that?

Paul Feig: Yeah, we love her at that point, so we’re going to go along on the ride with her. Also, it’s a heavy moment… This is what I don’t like about most drama, it tries to exorcise itself of all humor. And we’ve been to funerals – people are desperate to make jokes a funeral. My mother’s funeral, when I gave my speech, I had some jokes in there and it was one of the best sets I ever had. Just because people need that moment to let the air out of the tire a little bit.

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Paul Feig Talks About “Behavioral” Comedy

Ron Bennington: But, sometimes when we’re directing comedies and writing comedies we just feel like it’s got to be rat-tat-tat, laugh a second.

Paul Feig: Yeah, and that’s why – Judd and I both kind of get accused of our movies being a little too long, but the thing is you need a little bit of those times to get out of that rat-ta-tat-tat thing. It puts so much onus on the jokes, that unless those jokes are fucking hilarious, there is nothing worse as an audience member to go, “I know that was a joke, but it wasn’t very funny.” What happens is, ba-ba-na-na BOOM there’s the joke, and it just doesn’t pay off sometimes. Versus, comedy is very behavioral right now, it’s about how people are getting to the world and how they are reacting to each other. So, you need the time for that to breath.

Ron Bennington: When do you think we changed to become that type of thing, we went from jokes to behavior?

Paul Feig: I think it’s when the internet and YouTube came around. That’s my personal theory on it, because I was on “The Office”, the American version of it, basically from the beginning. I came on the second season, which was the first long season, and people were like, “I can’t watch that the camera is too crazy…” and this and that. Then within a year, people just suddenly, now they don’t even think about it, they like that because we’re watching videos of real things happening to real people.

Ron Bennington: And we almost prefer that, right now.

Paul Feig: Yeah, and I love it, it’s what I’ve always loved. I felt very stranded in the ether in the 90’s because the style was very big and broad and kind of winking at the camera, which is very funny, it’s just not what I know how to do.

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Paul Feig Talks About The Comedy That Inspired Him

Ron Bennington: But you grew up on 70’s stuff, this film starts making you feel like you’re watching a 70’s TV show. What did you like when you were a kid, what was the thing that made you think, “I want to do this?”

Paul Feig: I started in a weird place, like The Marx Brothers made me want to do stuff and then Steve Martin’s standup made me want to do things. I loved “All in the Family”, my mom made me watch the pilot of “All in the Family” when it first aired. She said, “I read that this is an important show, watch it.” That style… honestly, I think I can point to Norman Lear as developing a lot of my sense of humor. They were big broad characters, but they were completely grounded in reality, they were in this heightened world. So, they are dealing with all of these real world problems and having these real world emotions, but expressing them as extreme characters. We all love the extreme characters in our life, that we know. There are people that are nuts that we know, but we know he’s nuts. We’re not like, “Oh here’s my serious friend who is pretending to be funny.” But, I like big personalities in that way.

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Paul Feig Talks About Writing From An Actor’s Perspective

Ron Bennington: So, for you, acting first? It all starts from acting, even before writing? You think what can the actors do?

Paul Feig: Yeah, it’s a combo, the writing we spend so much time on. But, we write as actors, weirdly. Having been an actor for so long, when I write scripts, I’m honestly letting the acting side of me play these characters and they kind of lead me through a scene.

Ron Bennington: So, you’re standing up, doing voices, and figuring it out?

Paul Feig: Yeah, when I write by myself. Which is why it’s hard for me to write in a coffee shop, because I sound like a crazy person. (laughing) But, yeah I love kind of just – I need to test it out. What happens with a lot of writers is they write things that can’t come out of a human being’s mouth and it’s great on paper. The years of directing television, I’d occasionally get a show runner who just had these jokes they loved and they were trying to force me to go in and make him say it just like this and you’re like, “This is a funny person who is doing this line, but his mouth doesn’t work that way. Let’s just let them tweak it so it comes out naturally.” Then they would say, “No, he has to say it just like this,” and you’re like, “Then no one is going to be happy, because it’s not going to come out the way you want it and he can’t do it and it’s not going to be funny.”

Ron Bennington: Then you go in front of an audience and you cut out, I’m sure, some great jokes, some killer jokes.

Paul Feig: Oh yeah. “Kill your babies,” is our mantra in there. You’re constantly going, “Oh shit, I don’t want to lose this.” But, that’s why the world of DVD and BluRay has been so great, because it used to be if it’s not in, it doesn’t exist. And now it’s basically like, “Oh, that would be funny, we’ll just put that on the disc.” Movies should be getting better because of that, because we’re not just jamming everything in.

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Paul Feig Talks About The Editing Process

Ron Bennington: It’s also tough when you’re doing all of that stuff, not to lose your humor. Doing it over and over, you certainly don’t want to forget why you got into this in the first place.

Paul Feig: And that’s why we rely on the test audiences, because you do lose perspective so quickly. I work with some of the best editors in comedy. Bill Kerr who did “Bridesmaids”, and then Brent White and his team who did “The Heat”, a good editor’s power is to be able to watch something every time and some how watch it as an audience member, seeing it for the first time. But, at the same time, there are things that we just don’t know. We think it’s going to be funny, but you’ve got to get up in front of that audience and then that helps you. Also, for me, that’s the fun because I didn’t get into this business for awards and all of these things, you get in to make an audience laugh. When you put up a movie for the first or second time, and it’s kind of killing, it’s like, “Oh, thank God.” And then you just want to make it even stronger and stronger.

Ron Bennington: When you bring up the editing, they don’t realize how much a one second pause can help or destroy something that is great.

Paul Feig: It’s so mathematical that it actually sounds – people can get really cynical about how mathematically we do this because it doesn’t seem like art. But, again it’s like composing a symphony. You really listen and say, “Where’s the bad note? Where’s the thing? The guy didn’t come in quick enough with the bass drum or whatever.” So we’re really just fine-tuning that constantly.

Ron Bennington: The reason why I think it is art is because we don’t really know the formula. You’re doing the math, but you can’t sit there and make up a mathematical formula and say, “This is a joke.”

Paul Feig: No, but that’s what is so exciting about comedy, it’s always different. Then the audience – right when you think you know what an audience wants, they’ll completely change on you. But, honestly you never do a project – anyone who doesn’t admit to this is full of shit – you never end a project that is successful without saying, “Holy shit, we got away with that one. I don’t even know how that happened.” Just kind of a lot of things happen the right way and that’s why it ups the odds for me if I go, “I want your idea, I want your idea. Melissa, if you’ve got something, give it to me. Sandy, if you’ve got something… the writers on the set, keep stuff coming at me.”

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Paul Feig Talks About His Next Project

Ron Bennington: Do you know what you have planned next?

Paul Feig: Yeah, I’m going to do another movie with Melissa…we start shooting in the Spring. It’s like a female James Bond thing that I wrote, because I love the spy movies. I love James Bond and I know no one is ever going to let me direct a James Bond movie, so I’m going to write my own.

Ron Bennington: So, it’s going to be Melissa as James Bond?

Paul Feig: No, no, no (laughing) I don’t know if the James Bond estate is aware of this. No, I wanted to create my own kind of female spy thing, and I’m really excited about it. There are roles for other funny women and funny people

Ron Bennington: Well, it’s crazy how you two found each other, too. It’s working out for both of you.

Paul Feig: It’s kind of the greatest thing. When you find your comedy muse or your comedy partner, it’s really exciting. And obviously we’re all going to work with different people, but we always end up gravitating back towards each other.

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