"I feel there's a lot riding on this for very funny women in comedy," Feig admitted to Movieline via telephone Wednesday. "If it doesn't do well or doesn't do box office the way people want it to then it's very easy for them to go, 'Oh well -- see, you can't have women carrying movies!'"
Feig's right. Bridemaids, which is tracking well and has earned rave reviews ever since its SXSW debut earlier this year, will be a test of sorts for the drawing power of female comedians at the box office. But star, Saturday Night Live favorite, and co-writer (with Annie Mumolo) Wiig is arguably the most popular comic actress of the moment and is supported by a talented cast that includes Maya Rudolph, Wendi McClendon-Covey, Melissa McCarthy, Rose Byrne, Ellie Kemper, and the late Jill Clayburgh. (Not to mention adorable Chris Dowd as Wiig's love interest, Jon Hamm as her douchebag sometimes booty call, and a surprise cameo by a pop group that ties everything together kind of perfectly.)
Post-Bridesmaids, Feig "has a few deals swirling" and intends on writing an original script for longtime collaborator Apatow to produce -- and he's leaving the door wide open for a sequel. Read on as Feig chats with Movieline about his opening weekend nerves, why Bridesmaids is the rare comedy that doesn't spoil the best jokes in its trailers, how the film's infamous gross-out scene developed and why it turns off the faint-hearted ("There are shit people, and there are non-shit people"), and why it doesn't bother him that everything Judd Apatow touches becomes known as an Apatow movie.
I've been reading your Tweets. Do I sense a feeling of nervousness going into your opening weekend?
I'm very nervous. It's very nerve-wracking, you know, because you want it to do well. And actually as it gets a good response it makes you more nervous. You're like, "Oh boy, what if after all that it still doesn't do well?"
Really, why is that?
Yeah. I feel there's a lot riding on this for very funny women in comedy, because if it doesn't do well or doesn't do box office the way people want it to then it's very easy for them to go, "Oh well -- see, you can't have women carrying movies!" And that would be such an enormous tragedy, as we all know.
So on top of the pressure of directing a movie, you feel the added responsibility of an entire community of performers?
In some weird way -- it's probably me overhyping it -- but the intention of this movie, beyond making just an awesome movie that Kristen Wiig can be fantastic in and to bring her vision to the screen, is also, you know, I've just been such a fan of female comedians and actresses. It's become a watershed sort of a thing, and it's like, let's not put too much pressure on it! Let's just realize these are really funny women and really funny women should be doing tons more movies.
Totally with you. I saw Bridesmaids at SXSW, and ever since then I've been barely containing my desire to karaoke to [recording artist redacted] until the movie came out, because otherwise I'd be spoiling that great moment for everybody.
[Laughs] Oh, you're very funny. No, we tried to keep it under wraps and occasionally some article would come out and give it away and we're like, "Hey, shut up!"
That's particularly tough when opening comedies; you don't want to ruin the jokes in the marketing materials, and yet you have to give people a sense of what the film's like.
That's the hardest thing we all grapple with in terms of the marketing. You're like, "Don't give away that joke!" The greatest way for people to experience a comedy is to go in not knowing anything about it. But because of marketing, it's impossible. Marketing meaning that in order to get people to come you can't just go, "Hey, there's a great movie -- we're not going to show you anything from it but trust us!" That's why it's actually good that we shoot so much extra material that, as you notice now, a lot of the stuff isn't actually in the movie.
Right! I noticed that right away and was curious as to whether that was intentional so you wouldn't have to give away the best gags from the final cut.
Well, it's kind of half and half. The irony is that the studio gets the dailies as we're shooting them, so they have everything as they go along and they generally turn it over to the marketing department, so they're already combing through stuff finding things. Actually at a certain point when we're putting the movie together we'll say, "Hey, send us the things you pulled that you think are funny," because maybe they saw something that we missed. But our feeling is as long as we're putting stuff that's funny into the trailer and what's in the movie is as funny or funnier, then you wouldn't go, "Hey, wait a minute, what happened here!" When I was at the lab, you read the comment boards or Twitter and everyone's all like, "Oh, great, now I don't have to see it because I saw all the funny moments in the trailer." I just want to scream from the roof, "NONE of them are in the trailer!" but that, actually, will sound bad too. [Laughs]
On the one hand I'm glad that some of my favorite parts aren't spoiled in the trailers. But I also find it interesting that entire subplots seen in the trailers don't appear in the final film -- Annie's sad dating life, with the kid eating the birth control pill...
Right. But you'll be happy to know that's in the extended cut that will be coming out on DVD. So it is technically in there, just not yet.
Most directors say the theatrical cut is their cut, so how much does the extended cut change the theatrical version?
That was the hard part. When you make the theatrical movie, you do feel that's what you want to put forward because you worked so hard to make the pace, the story, everything really work well. But when we faced the extended cut it was more saying, "Let's not just dump stuff in just to dump it in." But there were a few things we just like, that, because of our extensive running length it was like, "I would miss these if they weren't in there but it's just going to make the movie too long." We shot a couple of blind date scenes for her but this one was really funny, let's put that in. There are a couple of funny scenes that set it up, and moments in other scenes where we had a second joke that we thought was very funny... but we were very judicious about what we put in, we didn't make it one of those 'An Extra 20 Minutes!' Because then the movie just wears out its welcome.
You spoke previously about using test screenings to help edit the film, but when do you ever know you're done?
Eventually you just run out of time. [Laughs] They say you never finish a movie, they just take it away from you. But we were in post for a long time... the first time you do a test screening you bring a product that you're pretty sure works, or you hope works. And then when you show it you hear the parts that don't get as big of a response, and you switch out and move it forward. And Judd's really good at knowing, "OK, I think we're there, I think we're good. Let's make one more pass and just see if there's anything we're missing."
Improv played a key role in the performances you got from your cast, many of whom were alumni of the Groundlings together. Which scene do you think benefited most from improvisation?
The one for me that stands out is the airplane scene, and just all of the stuff that Kristen's doing. It was definitely scripted out, some of those lines she was hitting, but it was just her taking it and running with it. I shot them over and over and over again partly selfishly because she was making me laugh so much, I just wanted to see what she was going to do if I started it again. [Laughs] So yeah, it was always throwing such curveballs at us, but it was the whole cast. It just worked well. We started with a structured thing and we had lines lined up and that sort of then devolved into, "Try this," or "Try that," or I'd give them an idea. The girls always had a laugh because my catchphrase is "Dealer's Choice!" Which means just take it anywhere you want it to go, do whatever you want with it, and let's see if we get anything out of it.
Can we talk about the gross-out scene? It's one of the big moments people are already talking about, and it's also the kind of gag that seems to be drawing men in. Why did you change the original dress fantasy sequence into this gross-out bonanza?
The dress scene that was written was really fun, but it was tonally different.
Girlier?
Well, it was Kristen's character Annie liking this dress so much that she has this really goofy, funny fantasy about what her life would be like wearing this dress. She runs into Matt Damon and Christian Bale has her hide in his muscles, and men are fighting over her. It was really funny but it felt for us that to go into a fantasy sequence wouldn't tonally match what we wanted. And we also wanted a set piece, a higher stakes comedy scene. It was Judd, he was like, "What do we do? OK, they all get food poisoning!" For us it was like, "God, that's really funny" so all of us ran off to write our version of the scene and compared notes and played with it a lot. Judd really steered that one along because there was the fear that it would just be some kind of gross-out scene, but like he said, the whole thing of it is the comedy of people trying to pretend nothing is happening.
And that's what's at the core of the dress shop scene; as everyone starts puking in their couture, Wiig is trying to hold it together and sort of failing miserably.
Everything is normal when something terrible is going on, then as we continued to work it we defined also that it's a showdown between Kristen and Rose, but it's basically showing Annie's character, why she's held back. She won't admit that she's wrong, she won't take responsibility for her actions. So she doesn't have any money so she takes them all to a cheap restaurant and it backfires, but she doesn't want to admit that she's wrong in front of Helen so for us, then, it's the comedy of what if the evidence in front of her is so overwhelming that she can't deny it and yet she still keeps denying it, or trying to invent different reasons why it wasn't her fault. So within all the gross-out, we are actually advancing the story and you learn a lot about Kristen's character, but in a funny and outrageous way.
Absolutely. And by the end of that scene, I was dying.
Good! It's a funny touchstone. I don't know, I could be wrong but it seems like the people calling us out on it more are the male critics. That's not across the board, there's definitely some women who have called it out. But I just love watching it because I haven't heard women laugh like that at something... there are plenty of women who are horrified by it, but the ones who are laughing -- it's just the kind of laughing that makes you so happy. Like, this person really can't believe they're seeing what they're seeing.
If I may venture a guess, perhaps it's just that there are barf people and there are non-barf people in the world.
There totally are. There are shit people and there are non-shit people! There's nothing I like better than a good fart or shit joke. My wife is just horrified, she's always like, "Stop doing those! Stop putting those in stuff!" They're funny! They're humanizing. As long as you do it in a quote-unquote classy way.
Tell me about your working relationship with Judd. How do you get around the misconception that anything Judd touches is "a Judd Apatow movie" even when he's not the director?
You know what, Judd is one of my oldest friends. We used to do stand-up together. We did Freaks and Geeks together. He deserves every bit of kudos he gets, he's a brilliant producer and storyteller, he knows how to be able to look at the big picture and say, "Here's what's missing -- here's what you need." And I've always been good with then carrying it out. What I would say about Freaks and Geeks is I wouldn't have been able to do it without Judd and he couldn't have done it without me. That's how I feel about this movie too, and us in general; we have our own stuff that we do, and I think we do quite well when we're on our own. But I don't get hung up on that stuff. I just know that Judd makes what I do better, and I don't have an ego about it beyond that. At the end of the day if you want to entertain people, you've got to take your ego out of the equation.
The big problem is that when you're working in this business and people who are in charge, you don't trust or you don't trust their taste, or your taste and their taste are out of sync -- then it's a nightmare because they're dictating stuff to you and they're in a powerful position to get it and you have to fight not to get it. I just need to work with people that I trust implicitly and know that we have such a similar sense of humor and taste that it's just going to make everything better. And at the end of the day, I just want a movie that's great, that people are going to love and laugh at and be affected by, and also have an emotional journey.
Who are the people that you do trust implicitly to work with?
I feel like there's really only a couple of people in Hollywood that I trust that much. One is Judd and one is Greg Daniels from The Office. Because we all are in comedy and we all subscribe to the same theory which is that the comedy doesn't mean anything if the emotional core is not right, so you have to tell a very real story and in a real way. Then you can put the comedy on top of it, or the comedy is going to come out of it because you put funny people in it and now you care about these people and you can play with their foibles, you can play with their mistakes, you can play with their insecurities, and the comedy is very human.
The story could conceivably go on, since you set up this rich cast of characters. What do you say to Bridesmaids 2?
You know what, we're open to anything. At the end of the day it's just about, can we get a great story and not sully the memory of the first one. [Laughs] There's nothing worse than the sequel that's a letdown from the first movie. But these characters are so strong and they're our friends now; I'm wide open to it. To get to work with this group again -- what could be better than that?
Bridesmaids is in theaters Friday.