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Peter Segal Gets Smart
How a decision made in college brought audiences one of this summer's most anticipated comedies
How does a journalist transition into the role of moviemaker? Admittedly, this isn’t a foreign question to me—nor, would I imagine to many of my fellow movie-loving writers out there. It certainly wasn’t beyond the scope of questions Peter Segal asked himself during his college years at the University of Southern California. There’s more action; things just seem more exciting on the other side of the desk. So, as many of us wish we could do, the now-director took a detour from his journalism track in the pursuit of art.
From the beginning, Segal carved a niche for himself as the director of action-packed comedies. From his first feature Naked Gun 33 1/3 to the hijinks of his remake of The Longest Yard, he has managed to capture the disparate skills—pratfalls and natural comedic stylings among them—of the genre’s top players. Among his collaborators over the years, Segal has worked with Chris Farley, Eddie Murphy and Adam Sandler. His latest project, Get Smart, features the newest comedian to conquer the box office: Steve Carell.
Carell, the popular actor from NBC’s “The Office” has taken on the character of Maxwell Smart, a role first made popular by Don Adams in the 1960s television series of the same name. As an analyst for the secret government agency CONTROL, Smart longs to be where the action is—on the other side of the desk. Like Segal, he takes action in making sure he’s not left wondering, ‘What if?’ Paired with Agent 99 (played by Anne Hathaway, who once again proves that women can be smart, pretty and comfortably kick some ass along the way), Smart is sent on a mission that will take him around the world looking for members of rival foreign agency KAOS.
As in the original series, created by Mel Brooks and Buck Henry, Segal’s film version features lots of gadgets, sexual tension and laughs. With a cast of actors including Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson as the hulking and idolized Agent 23 and Academy Award-winner Alan Arkin as The Chief, Segal’s newest comedy proves that not only did he choose the right path after all, but that with the right director, some television adaptations are worthy of the big screen. The day before the movie’s theatrical release, MM spoke with Segal finding out just how his life led him to this weekend.
Mallory Potosky (MM): You’ve directed Naked Gun 33 1/3, Tommy Boy and 50 First Dates. When you went to film school, were these the types of movies you were attracted to? Is that what you wanted to go into—making people laugh?
Peter Segal (PS): You know, when I was in school I had no idea that I was going to wind up making movies. I thought originally I was going to go into journalism so that’s what I was studying at USC—Broadcast Journalism and English. I was a double major. The first two years at USC were very writing-intensive and then my first production class in television introduced me to the making of television things. I fell in love with it and thought, ‘Well, okay. How do I get into this business? Because I think this is a lot more fun.’
My best friend and roommate was a cinema major, so I would frequently crash his Cinema 466 class, which was the famous class at USC where filmmakers come in, screen their movie and do Q&As with the students. So I would frequently go in and listen to the directors and realized that I was in love with this—but I had no idea how to get into it. I started out with an internship at local Channel 2 and just started from there.
MM: Now you’re directing an anticipated summer movie so there’s already a few built-in audience types: Fans of Mel Brooks, Steve Carell and the original series. How do you think that you made this movie appeal to all of them—or even people who were not fans?
PS: Well first of all, we had to make a movie that would appeal to both fans of the original series as well as people who were unfamiliar with it. I always operate from a standpoint of ‘What I would like to see if I was in the theater?’ I love the original series; there’s no way that we could ever top that. What Mel and Buck created was iconic and once we realized that we could never replace the show (nor would we want to), we just decided we had to embrace the spirit of what they created—the characters, the catchphrases, the gadgets—and infuse a contemporary story with those things as well as the political satire that made that show so iconic. If we did that and if we brought together this cast that we were thinking about… You know, once Steve Carell was on, and by bringing in Anne Hathaway, Dwayne Johnson, Alan Arkin, etc., we thought we could appeal to all of the legions of fans that are following “The Office” as well as The Devil Wears Prada as well as The Rock’s huge following and then we could combine these groups.
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Posted 10.15.08 | News/Commentary | No comments yet...
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