All right, so I wanna get specific. I talked to Dan Gregor and Doug Mand about the Snowman’s Cottage sequence, which is just like a showstopper of a sequence. I was laughing so hard at that. I know that you said that the idea just kind of popped into your head early one morning, but I was curious if there were any other drastically different versions of that scene before you had that idea and what they were like?
That’s a great question. We definitely wrote some other montages, but I do not recall what they were. They were fine, but none of them felt different enough. Not different enough from the old “Naked Gun” one but just different enough from all of the making fun of montages that have happened in the last 30 years. It is well-worn territory. The first “Naked Gun” one is classic, and then there’s so many others. The one that always comes to mind is like “Team America,” “You need a montage.” Like, once they have the song talking about it, they’ve really broken it. I wish I do remember, but I don’t remember the other ones. There was no debate. Once I wrote that one, we were all like, “Good.”
The one final bit that I wanna talk about is the TiVo bit, which feels so personal and specific, and it just comes out of nowhere. What was the inception of that?
It’s so funny ’cause in some of these interviews, I talk a lot about momentum and how the movie just had to move, and how if a joke didn’t work, I would always cut it. Even things that went further, like sometimes we’d cut the last beat off if it climaxed at one part. Then when it gets to the “Buffy” joke, it’s indefensible. That’s just me.
It’s the only joke that’s still makes me laugh. I’ve seen the movie a thousand times, scrutinized every frame. It’s all just like ones and zeros to me now of color and sound and mix. None of it makes me laugh anymore. That joke still makes me laugh every time. It was always polarizing. Half the audience would be like, “Do not touch it. It’s the best joke in the movie.” And half the audience would be like, “Get that out of here. I don’t even have a clue what that was.”
It’s so good. Especially the silence there, when he’s like, “Hold on,” and he’s hooking it up and waiting for it to boot up.
Yeah, “Just stand there. Just stand there.” I think even for people who don’t love it, if they watched the movie another time or two more times now knowing it, I think it will become their favorite joke.
That’s how much I believe in it.
I had to tell Liam, “No, I know that one doesn’t — It only plays for half the audience.” It’s just my favorite and I like that we don’t explain it. I think there’s a lot of people also that by the time he’s in the […], when he’s in the cab, after the cab ride, and he’s got the TiVo, there’s people that laugh there and I go like, “I think there’s some people that are just watching it trying to figure out where it’s going and what it is as a joke, because I don’t recognize its format from anything.” It’s Liam’s performance that kills it.
Absolutely.
He’s just so dedicated. So, I think those people then will be laughing from the beginning the next time. You know what I mean? But I have to admit, it was self-indulgent. I know.
“The Naked Gun” is playing in theaters now.