To replicate the same on-screen, chaotic magic thatLeslie Nielsencaptured withThe Naked Guntrilogy, it took years, rewrites, and the creative collaboration of comedians like directorAkiva Schaffer, producerSeth MacFarlane, and co-writing teamDan GregorandDoug Mand. On paper,The Naked Gunhad everything a successful blockbuster needs:Liam Neesonat the top of the call sheet, a whip-smart team behind the scenes, and the backing of a studio like Paramount Pictures. Now, it’s already raked in critical acclaim before ever even officially hitting theaters.
In the reboot, Neeson plays L.A. detective Frank Drebin Jr., who’s every bit as reckless as his father (Nielsen), which makes him a shoo-in for the elite Police Squad. However, when the sultry Beth Davenport (Pamela Anderson) reports the mysterious murder of her brother, Drebin is on the case, and stumbles into a massive conspiracy. The movie also stars Paul Walter Hauser, Danny Huston, Kevin Durand, and CCH Pounder.
Before the movie’s release, Collider’sSteve Weintraubhad the opportunity to chat with Schaffer about the responsibility and honor of bringing this comedy legacy back to life. They discuss the extensive writing process, how he, Gregor, and Mand whittled jokes down and tightened the runtime to a nearly-unheard-of-today, lean 85 minutes, just like its predecessors. They discuss Blu-ray extras, a sequel, and that side-splitting infrared sequence, plus Schaffer shares updates onI Think You Should LeaveSeason 4 and what fans can expect fromThe Lonely Island.
Will We Ever See ‘Chip ‘N Dale: Rescue Rangers’ on Something Like HBO Max?
Here’s why that seems unlikely.
COLLIDER: You know how much I loveChip ‘N Dale[Rescue Rangers]. Did Disney ever tell you like how well it did, or are you still in the dark?
AKIVA SCHAFFER: I’m still in the dark. I mean, to me, as a civilian looking at it, I think it was kind of like a lot of streaming titles where a bunch of people saw it. It was awesome that we won the Emmy for best TV movie, because that’s what it was. Then it kind of just becomes part of the library. I keep wanting to actually have a meeting over there, I just haven’t had the time, where I pitch to them, like, why don’t you take the ones that you own that become kind of just in the library and make a block and put them on Netflix for two years and see if they find new people? Or license them out a little bit the way they do for their other movies, where you might see, I don’t know,Maleficenton HBO, for all I know? You know what I mean? The ones that are made for Disney+, why can’t they then put those over into their other ecosystems that allow them to travel around and kind of meet new people?
I agree with you. I also understand that they’re trying to build up their streaming service, so there are exclusive titles. I see both sides of it, but the movie is awesome and it needs more people to see it.
SCHAFFER: Thank you very much. I appreciate that.
‘I Think You Should Leave’ Season 4 Is in the Works
“There are sketches.”
I don’t know what you can say, but when am I going to hear news aboutI Think You Should LeaveSeason 4?
SCHAFFER: They have a deal, and they’ve been writing sketches, but they also have the HBO show, and they’ve got to finish up that season. So, I don’t have a date or anything like that, but just know there are sketches that I have not read that they have written.
So Tim [Robinson] told me a while ago, I guess it’s almost been a year, “It’s coming.”
SCHAFFER: They want to do it, and Netflix wants it, so it will happen. It’s just that they are doing this season of this HBO show. They’ve got to wrap that up, and then, I’m assuming, they’ll switch gears back to it.
Well, at least it’s good news that it’s not dead.
SCHAFFER: No, no, no. It is not dead yet.
The Lonely Island Has Enough Songs for a New Album
During the writers’ strike, the iconic trio got the band back together.
In the last year, Lonely Island did a short, “Sushi Glory Hole.” I think it was your first short in, like, five years.
SCHAFFER: I’ve been doing press forNaked Gunfor, like, this whole week, and I kept thinking somebody was going to bring it up because it’s the last thing I did besides this, and you are somehow the first person. So, thankyou, because I’d love to talk about “Sushi Glory Hole,” and nobody brought it up.
I’m glad I’m the first one. The thing about that is that it was for the 50th anniversary. You guys hadn’t done one in, like, five years. How much pressure did you guys put on yourselves to deliver something funny and worthy of the five-year break?
SCHAFFER: We got lucky in a couple of ways. Thank you for thinking it was worthy.Iwas very proud of that one. But we got lucky in that the writers' strike, not that that was lucky, but during the writers’ strike, one of the things we could do was make songs. So me, Andy [Samberg], and Jorma [Taccone], on certain off weeks, would just get together and make songs, not knowing where they’d end up, or if we’d one day get an album together. We made a lot of songs because it was the only thing that we could do.
Then, the other thing that happened is that SNL and Lorne [Michaels] and Andy got together and were like, “Oh, you should play Kamala [Harris]’s husband, Doug [Emhoff]. So, all of a sudden, Andy was kind of getting back in the rhythm. He was flying there every week doing the thing with Maya [Rudolph], so he was back in the mix. So, it was easy to be like, “Oh, we should do a short.” The 50th kind of gave him an excuse, but Andy was already there. Then it wasn’t the high-stakes thing that it used to be, of, like, “We’ll come up with one on Tuesday.” We were like, “We have that song. We made it during the strike.”
So, it was a bunch of great things coming together. I was very busy editingNaked Gun, so the only thing that was really hard was the studio people who spend a lot of money every week holding a staff together to edit a movie, and you have to go, like, “I’m going to bail out on Wednesday of this week and just be gone the rest of the week.”
You mentioned that you guys were writing songs. How many songs did you guys write that you feel are worthy of an album or for the future?
SCHAFFER: We have, like, 10 to 20 demo versions, rough drafts of songs, and I think a lot of them would be worthy of being on an album. I don’t know how many “Sushi Glory Holes” we have necessarily right now, but we have a lot of tracks that we think are funny.
How much did you debate which song would be the one that you make the short, or was it clear that it was going to be “Sushi Glory Hole?”
SCHAFFER: There was a little bit of debate, but then that was the one that we felt like we wanted to do. And Jorma, I don’t think, was available. I forget where he was, but he was not around, so one that’s just me and Andy was also part of the equation.
What is the status of these songs, of you guys possibly doing an album? What’s the status of The Lonely Island right now in terms of either touring again or new stuff?
SCHAFFER: We make the podcast with Seth Meyers every week, so that’s keeping us in each other’s space in a really nice way. Then we have these songs, so we need to figure out how. I mean, we did two on the show, because we also did “Here I Go,” the one with Andy and Charli xcx. We want to record a couple more and polish them all up and mix them, and maybe get some guests, and then figure out if there’s a game plan. So, much likeI Think You Should LeaveSeason 4, it’s on the horizon, but I don’t know when.
‘The Naked Gun’ Is Bringing Comedy Back to the Big Screens
“I don’t get any more [Will] Ferrell/[Adam] McKay movies? That was it?”
When I sawThe Naked Gun, it was in LA. It was the first screening, and I’ve seen Seth MacFarlane intro a few screenings, and every single time I’ve seen him intro, it is the funniest four to five minutes. He just kills, and it’s because, clearly, he’s either writing his stuff or his writing team is writing a killer four to five minutes.
SCHAFFER: I assume he wrote it, but I didn’t pry, like, “Oh, wait a minute, who wrote that?” But it was a shockingly good four minutes or five minutes where I was on the side of the stage having prepared nothing, just having kind of gotten up, being like, “Alright, yeah, you need me to intro. Okay, I’ll say hi to the crowd and say thanks for coming.” Then all of a sudden, he’s up there with index cards, just ripping one-liner after one-liner.
For people who are watching this, who can never see Seth MacFarlane intro a movie, he will kill. He does not mess around. It’s like murder. You know what I mean?
SCHAFFER: It’s why he is who he is.
100%. So, the next big question I’m going to ask you is, why are studios not making more comedies?
SCHAFFER: Oh, man, I have no clue about that. I feel like you and your fellows at Collider probably have written the think pieces and probably have more in the hopper and have a more bird’s eye view of the industry, and probably have the theories. I don’t know. For me, and maybe Andy and Jorma, I’d say as a group, I don’t really feel those shifts, beinginsidethe business. I feel that the same as viewers, where I’m like, “Oh, I don’t get any more [Will] Ferrell/[Adam] McKay movies? That was it? We used to count on them, every two to three years, giving us a newOther GuysorStep BrothersorAnchorman, or whatever. I just miss them. I miss seeing them. I miss there being a new Ben Stiller, a newTropic Thunder, something like that. Anyway, I’m more on the fan side of not knowing. I’ve noticed that we’ve always operated in the fringes a little on the “We’re going to do whatever we’re going to do.”
Have Liam and Pamela sent you a thank-you card for their relationship?
SCHAFFER: You know they haven’t.
I’m messing around. I never ask about personal life, but that one, I just had to.
SCHAFFER: It’s open season now, but I have no insights.
‘The Naked Gun’ Team Took Extra Care to Tighten the Story
Schaffer discusses finding the best story, even if it means letting go of great jokes.
So, you co-wrote the script. I’m always curious how things change in the development process. So, the three of you sit down and you’re writing. Did you originally have a much different idea? Talk about where you started, to what people see.
SCHAFFER: That’s a very good question. Because now that it’s been a couple of years since we started, we’re iterating so fast and writing a whole first act that gets thrown away, and then the best jokes somehow make their way into new jokes. When we were trying to figure it out, I would say we were operating on two tracks at once. One was just brainstorming jokes, set pieces that you don’t even know how they’ll fit in, but just identifying tropes. It was just going, “Oh, when somebody breaks their cell phone because it’s a burner, and now they can’t get traced,” that’s an area where we could do… I have a notes stock on my phone that, with no context, just has, like, “break phone, then ask somebody to borrow their phone, breakstheirphone, then breaks a landline, then breaks a walkie-talkie.” That’s not in the movie, but that just goes. Or, “Oh,Mission: Impossible, the walls fall down. What can you do with that? Oh, other walls fall down. How do they build the sets? Does Ethan Hunt’s team just have fake hospitals and hotel rooms and a big soundstage in every continent on Earth, ready to trick people? Who are the builders? What’s the electrician doing to build it?” Just all the questions you have, if you’re in this mindset watching all these movies.
So, there’s that pile that’s just like, “God, it’d be so good to get any of that into this movie.” And then there’s the other thing, which is justtrying to find the story that will be the best versionto make sure it can work and that it can stay interesting and that the jokes will work. I feel like, of those two, I mean, we wrote thousands of jokes that don’t make it in, and we broke different stories that weren’t the story ultimately. But I don’t remember great examples to give you.
When you guys were writing, was there any sort of deadline put on you by anyone to deliver by a certain point?
SCHAFFER: It wasn’t as much that as much as it was just full steam ahead from the moment I said yes, and they agreed to letting me hire Dan [Gregor] and Doug [Mand], and then Dan and Doug agreed to letting me be a third of the writing team, because they are a writing team, and this was the three of us together the entire time. Once that all was going, we treated it like we were greenlit from that moment, even though we very much weren’t. But it’s so rare to have a studio that goes, “We have Liam Neeson. He’s interested.Wewant to make it. We think it’s a good idea. We just don’t have a director or a script, so it’s all on you.” A lot of times, you’re fighting uphill. It’s a battle to convince people. These people are already convinced. They just don’t have somebody making it.
I just saw it as such a rare opportunity in that moment, so we treated it like it was a greenlit TV show. We showed up to my office every day, Monday through Friday, and we were moving so fast. I would turn things into the studio and go, “By the time you give me notes, I’m gonna have a completely different version.” And then I would, and then just give them that one. We were going fast. But yeah, there wasn’t a deadline. The strike did make it take longer, but as far as these things go, it was fast.
Early Buzz For the ‘Naked Gun’ Reboot Is Surprisingly Consistent
A legendary comedy franchise is back with a bang - but does it hit the mark?
It’s so interesting that you say that because people don’t understand how rare that is, because normally everyone is trying to convince the studio to make a movie and to land a star, and to do the scheduling. The fact that they were very interested in this project is so unusual.
SCHAFFER: Exactly. That’s why I took it very seriously.Andthe fact that it was Liam. I mean, that was the real thing.
How long did it take you guys from beginning to end to write this thing?
SCHAFFER: What’s funny is when people have asked me that, I kept saying it’s been two years, but I was forgetting that there was a writers’ strike and these things. So, the first phone call or Zooms I had with Paramount and Fuzzy Door was, I’ve been saying two years, but it isthreeyears. It was the summer. It was almost to the day. It was, like, August of 2022 was the first, “Hey, would you ever be interested inThe Naked Gun?” And then we were writing. We started writing in the fall. So, let’s say October. So, from October of then, with the hiatus for the strike, and with then another, and then we shot it last summer.
If You Want More ‘Naked Gun,’ Go to the Theaters!
“Everything’s on the table.”
I’m praying that this is a huge hit because I want it to be a huge hit for you guys, but I want more comedies. It’s important to me that this one performs for many reasons, but I also would love to have more of this because it’s really fucking funny. Are you interested in a sequel?
SCHAFFER: I am, but I also don’t want to jinx it with that kind of talk. I’ve been burned every time, almost, before. But yeah, everything’s on the table. We’ll see if people will go see it. I have no clue. You really think of a movie like this, just speaking ofHappy Gilmore 2, another legacy sequel comedy, one week ago, you expect it to come to your house. So, I don’t blame anybody for expecting that. But as someone like yourself who’s at a theater with people seeing it, it does make you really remember and go, “Oh my god, this is fun to be in here.” But if you haven’t done that recently, then you kind of have forgotten, and kind of go, “Eh, it’s fine. I’ll wait.” So, I wouldn’t blame anybody, but I do hope people show up.
There’s nothing like being in a sold-out theater and everyone laughing.You know that I’m obsessed with the editing process, especially on a comedy, because people don’t realize the importance of editing with jokes like this. It’s everything.
SCHAFFER: It’s the whole thing. We could easily have ruined the movie with the same exact footage. It would actually be more likely we would.
You hit the nail on the head. So I’m curious how much footage you guys actually assembled. Was it one of these things where you had a lot more footage and you’re trying to bring it down to, like, 90 minutes of the best stuff? Talk a little bit about the editing process.
SCHAFFER: Yeah, but not like when you’re on a [Judd] Apatow one where we can improvise everything. You could make a three-hour kind ofPopstar[Never Stop Never Stopping] and then get it down to 88 minutes. This, it’s not a bunch of people riffing. It’s not being like, “Hey, let’s go get loose, Jonah Hill. Do anything,” where, all of a sudden, him and Seth [Rogen] can go for 45 minutes on a new topic. These jokes have to be really scripted and planned out. That being said, in the writing process, even just trying to beat a joke, you end up with 10 versions of the same joke. You never know which one’s actually going to be the funniest on the day coming out of an actor’s mouth. So, the one that’s funniest on the page, sometimes the third alt that you shrugged about, Liam says it with a little twinkle in his eye, and that’s the funniest one. So, what we did have was a lot of alts of each thing.
Then, yes, it was about a 115-page script, and I knew it was going to be 85 minutes becauseNaked Gun 1is 85 minutes,Naked Gun 2½[The Smell of Fear] is 85 minutes, and I was like, “With this one, that is my goal.” And we are 85 minutes. Every one of these in this genre are under 90 minutes, that we love. All theAirplane!’s andTop Secret!’s andAustin PowersandBoratand everything, they’re all under 90. I knew that was the target. So, it definitely kept shrinking and shrinking as we fine-tuned it, but I would say it went from 95 to 85. I was able to get it to 95 without even an audience, just me going, “Alright, here’s the shape.” And then that last 10 minutes came down over the last six months.
Akiva Schaffer Takes Us Behind-the-Scenes for That Bonkers Infrared Sequence
For those who wanted the movie to cross that line, there’s more on the way.
Eventually, this will be out, hopefully on Blu-ray. I’m curious if you’ve already thought about doing, like, line-o-ramas, alt takes, or the extras.
SCHAFFER: Yeah. Actually, we already had to turn them in because you have to do it before you shut editorial down. So, it was a scramble in the last week of me doing sound mix. My editor and his assistant were just assembling every deleted thing they could think of, and it’s a lot of them. There’s line-o-ramas, there’s tons of stuff. It’s gonna be great. Then sometimes I think of one now and go, “We forgot about that one!” So, there are definitely a few that we missed, but there’s a lot in there.
I’m definitely going to ask about a certain animal. There’s an animal sequence and it’s hysterically funny. Talk a little bit about putting that sequence together because the entire audience loses their shit. It’s so good.
SCHAFFER: You’re talking about the infrared one, right?
SCHAFFER: We’re going to speak freely now, but please don’t ruin this for yourselves. The trailers already are lovely, but they show things. It’s so nice when the audience has no clue what’s coming on everything. But that one, there is a shadow puppet joke in one ofThe Naked Guns, and it made me go, like, “Oh, wow! There is one.” Then, of course, the most famous, most recent ones, still a long time ago, were inAustin Powers 2[The Spy Who Shagged Me], where they do a ton. So, we were wary to do it again because we know that that one’s pretty famous, but we also felt like we had a right because our source material had a shadow puppet joke, a shadow box kind of thing, and it’s kind of a part of the genre. It’s all the tropes of the genre of spoof, and we were kind of cherry-picking the ones we wanted to continue the legacy of ZAZ and Pat Proft into the future on all of them. So, this is one where we were like, “I think we want to do this.” We thought we had a fresh take on it. And because it’s kind of taking it into the 2000s up until now, tech spoof, you know what I mean? Was itEraser, that Schwarzenegger movie, with the tech gun that would see through walls?
Actually, when you watch those deleted scenes on a Blu-ray or on the extras on your iTunes purchase or whatever, wherever they all live in the future, there’s an extra section of that joke, and it was one of our last debates of whether to put it in or not. I don’t want to spoil it for even people that don’t care about spoilers. That’s why I’m not really talking about the specifics. I’m gonna look right at the camera. I don’t trust you at home to not just go, “I don’t care. I’ll just keep listening,” and I don’t want to ruin it. But it took it to a much crazier place for one more beat that, ultimately, polarized the audience between the people who were like, “Yes! You even took it to a crazier place,” and the people who were like, “Nope. Too far.” And in general, I’m okay doing that. I just want to take it to the crazier place. But I kind of went back and watched all the friends and family test screenings, and the laugh is just the biggest right where we got out, and then it would always be this half laugh on the next one, and momentum is king in these movies. So I was like, “Alright, let’s just keep plowing forward.” But it was fun doing it.
Do you know who Fatal Farm is? It’s these guys, Jeff [Max] and Zach [Johnson]. They do a lot of commercial work. They came into my life when I saw something called “Lasagna Cat,” and it was these live-action recreations of Garfield strips that are on the internet. Then they also did stuff that was, like, reimagined ‘80s TV show openings. So, it’d be like theAlfopening. You should go look up their website.
Liam Neeson’s ‘The Naked Gun’ Is Firing on All Cylinders With a Huge Debut Rotten Tomatoes Score
“Frank Drebin, Police Squad… the new version.”
I think I’ve seen some of these, but didn’t know who did it.
SCHAFFER: Did you ever see theRoboCopmovie where everyone did scenes fromRoboCop, and they assembled a homemade version ofRoboCop?
I saw the Indiana Jones one.
SCHAFFER: Got it. Yes. There’s aRoboCopone, and their section is very memorable. Anyway, they did “Coffin Flop.” They directed “Coffin Flop” fromI Think You Should Leave. So, all those bodies falling out of shit wood and hitting pavement. They’re amazing at special effects and at comedy and at doing both and understanding it and doing it for no money. We makeI Think You Should Leavefor nothing, and I was like, “There’s no way we can do this sketch with ours, but if we just hand it to them and let them guest-direct it, they’re going to go off and figure it out.” And that’s “Coffin Flop,” one of the best of all time.
Anyway, I had the same thing with this heat vision scene where I was like, “God, there’s a lot of choreography needed here, and I’m worrying about a whole movie. I need a choreographer to come in with cardboard boxes on a soundstage and figure out where the oven should be versus the kitchen island versus where the dog should enter, so that from 100 feet away and binoculars, everything will flatten to the right spot, and we legitimately get this correct and do it for real.” And they went off into a warehouse in LA and goofed around. First, they did it in previs in a computer, and then went off to a warehouse and figured it all out for me, basically, and it was so rad. It was like using stunt people to do stunt-vis, where then I could tweak it and talk to them. Then, I flew them out to where we were shooting on the day to do it, and they helped me get all the heat vision footage. We used a real heat vision camera, a real infrared camera. It’s not VFX for that. And then I directed Liam and Pam the next day to do the real stuff. That’s how we did it.
