The creator of Freaks and Geeks and director of Bridesmaids is teaming up again with Melissa McCarthy, this time on the outrageous cop comedy The Heat . Feig talks about McCarthy, working on Arrested Development , and…a Bridesmaids sequel?
Via: Jennifer Graylock / Getty Images
You wouldn't necessarily expect the humble Midwestern guy sitting across the table, clad in a three-piece suit and purple tie, to be one of the most influential figures in modern-day comedy. He looks a little bit like a friendly banker, and since we're sitting at a long conference table with pens and pads, he even jokes about approving my loan.
Paul Feig has directed some of your favorite TV shows, created a cult-classic sitcom, and helped launch a whole generation of hilarious men and women to stardom. With Freaks and Geeks, he discovered Seth Rogen, James Franco, Jason Segel, Linda Cardellini, John Francis Daley, Martin Starr, and Busy Philipps. He directed a whole bunch of episodes of Arrested Development, The Office, 30 Rock, Parks and Recreation, Bored to Death, and Weeds. He even got behind the camera for an episode of Mad Men.
After an initial slipup with the movie Unaccompanied Minors in 2005, Feig hit it big with Bridesmaids in 2011, helping to launch Kristen Wiig and Melissa McCarthy, already stars, into the stratosphere. Now, he's reteamed with McCarthy on The Heat, a buddy cop movie set in Boston. McCarthy stars as an off-kilter and goofy-aggressive local police offer who gets paired with Bullock, an uptight FBI agent with the social self-awareness of a blindfolded child.
Before the film even hits theaters — which it does, nationally, on Friday — a sequel has been green-lit, and Feig says he's on board.
"Katie [Dippold, The Heat screenwriter] is writing it, who I love, and I love these characters. I had a blast," he told BuzzFeed. "Fingers crossed."
Via: 20th Century Fox
Since Bridesmaids, you've been the go-to guy to interview about how women can be funny, but the number of interviews you've done about women in comedy probably outnumber the number of female-focused comedy films that have been made since.
Paul Feig: I know. I love it because it's my favorite thing in the world — funny women, but at the same time you do go, like, wow, 2013, we're really still having this conversation? It's really that surprising to people.
It was like, "Bridesmaids is gonna do it!" And then nothing...
PF: I know, we're the only studio release this summer with women in leading roles. It's kind of like, wow, really? That's the advance we made? That I got to make another one? I was hoping there would be a better outcome than that. I really do kind of go, like, no, no that wasn't supposed to be the end result — there are female directors, other directors. I'm just concerned because there are so many funny women who should be working, and I can only work with so many of them at the time.
Melissa McCarthy is hilarious in The Heat, and there's a lot of physical comedy, but you resist the easy urge to make any jokes at all about her size, which would be the cheap and obvious choice to so many filmmakers.
PF: Yeah, to me, it should never be an issue. I don't like that kind of comedy. They make fun of the albino, but that's because we made him such an asshole — and also we're really making fun of the idea that albinos are always portrayed as the bad guys. That's why I have Foul Play and Matrix 2 at the beginning. I never liked name-calling when I was a kid; I got made fun of because of my nose or I was too tall or my ears were too big, so I don't find that enjoyable... Plus, Melissa is so lovely, why would you want to say mean things to her?
This is one of the only studio movies that's not a superhero movie this summer. And the way things are rated, those movies are PG-13. And in this movie, maybe one guy dies, and it's R.
PF: It's all about profanity. I saw that Fox or some network is trying to erase the FCC indecency thing, which, it might be time. I understand when you have kids and stuff, you don't want them corrupted, but at the same time, it's how people talk. And it's really hard to do comedy when you have to pull back, unless you're doing Napoleon Dynamite, where it's hilarious that they don't swear, but it's so aggressively not swearing that that's part of the character. To do this movie with bad guys and cops and nobody's saying "fuck," it's kind of like, gosh, it would feel — anything that distances an audience where they say, "That feels fake..." We're saving them from bad language that they hear every day.
Was there any conversation about, "We should try to make this PG-13"?
PF: Well, when I first signed on to it, they were like, "What's the rating going to be?" And I said a hard R. And they were like, "Really..." And it took them like a week to decide if they wanted to do that. Honestly that wall is breaking down, and I do feel like it's a slightly old business model to think, They don't make money if they're R, because look at Ted — it went through the roof. I just stuck to my guns. To have Melissa McCarthy and not have her swear, it's like, what's the point? She's hilarious when she's in that mode. So it was apparent that we had to do it that way.
You've become the godfather of comedy talent, from the Freaks and Geeks crew to now Melissa McCarthy.
PF: Thank you — I mean god knows I try. Judd [Apatow] is the same way. You're only as good as the people around you, and I like to think I'm creative but I'm not creative. With comedy especially, when you start to die in comedy as you get older is when you go, "Don't tell me! I know what I'm doing." You cannot survive, because comedy is ever-changing. The wake-up call for me was, I directed a lot of The Office over the years, and in the fifth season I went in as a co-exec producer, so I was in the writer's room a lot. They have all these twenty and thirtysomething writers who are hilarious, and some guys my age. So you have the kind of joke areas that you like to pitch and you get laughs, and I was pitching these out, and the twenty and thirties were looking at me like I was crazy. I realized, "Oh my god, I'm like dad. I'm telling dad jokes."
So hearing them and hearing their joke pitches, I said, "Oh, I see, it's the tone that's going on now." You say, "Oh, I get why that's funny now," and referentially you see what doesn't work because it's old or whatever. So you just need to then magnify that by a thousand and deputize everyone around you and make sure you're working with younger people, with older people, and you just want a big consensus — and that way you'll hit the whole audience basically.
