[lounge music] ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ [Narrator] "On Story" is brought to you in part by the Alice Kleberg Reynolds Foundation, a Texas family providing innovative funding since 1979.

[waves] [kids screaming] [wind] [witch cackling] [sirens wail] [gunshots] [dripping] [suspenseful music] [telegraph beeping, typing] [piano gliss] From Austin Film Festival, this is "On Story," a look inside the creative process from today's leading writers, creators and filmmakers.

This week on "On Story," we're joined by two of the writers behind "The Naked Gun," Doug Mand and Dan Gregor.

[Doug] "Airplane!"

created Leslie Nielsen as a comedic persona, but before that, he was just a dramatic character actor.

- A character actor.

[Doug] And that was really the thing that they sort of pinpointed was like, "We just want to play it as straight as possible," and so you know, we really took that concept and tried to apply it to the filmmaking as well.

That's something that we felt, really, was another way to sort of elevate this and bring it into the modern age.

[paper crumples] [typing] [carriage returns, ding] [typewriter dings] [John] Let's just jump right in.

First of all, I love the film.

[Doug] Thank you.

- It seems like an impossible task and maybe ill-advised one.

- Yeah.

- When you probably first heard about it, can you talk a little bit about your kind of first, how you were first introduced to the project?

- Well, yes, we first heard and we're like, "No, no one should do this movie.

There's no need to.

"Naked Gun" is a perfect franchise."

- Yeah.

- And if we had heard anyone else announce to write it, we'd be like, "[censored] them."

- Yeah.

- "Don't do that.

Don't touch it," but Paramount, we had done a movie with Akiva Schaffer.

We had done "Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers" on Disney, and we had this great experience.

Thank you, there's the one who saw it, [Doug laughs] and we love Akiva.

Akiva has a writing background, is an amazing director.

Paramount had come to him.

They had this idea with Liam already attached, and that made it all different.

The fact that Liam wanted to do it felt like it gave us a pass to do something where we weren't trying to beat or trying to do something, do something better, 'cause you can't.

Leslie Nielsen is the GOAT.

He's a unicorn, but Liam Neeson is an absolute icon, and he's doing his own thing, and it felt like it gave us a bit of a pass to try to do, to play in their sandbox, but do something a little bit different, but take the DNA of the movies we love so much, and we decided, "Let's just jump head first in there with Akiva and do the best we can."

- Without exaggeration, we walked onto that set with an 800-page alt packet, like... The crew hated us.

[John laughs] And... But it was our job.

It was like... The thing where Liam Neeson is so brilliant and perfect at what he does, and he's so in that persona that he was, basically, word perfect every first take, prepping a bunch of jokes, having areas and feeling it out with the actors became a really central part of the onset workload of finding new things, modifying things, stuff like that.

[soft footsteps] - What do you want, little one?

[mask rustles] - Your [censored].

[suspenseful music] [blade zings] [energetic action music] [John] Liam Neeson, how do you do better than that?

[Doug] Yeah.

- And interesting that he was attached beforehand, so you kind of... Were you sort of writing with him in mind?

- Okay, Liam Neeson, unto himself has spent the last, you know, 15 years creating a little mini genre of like, "I'm a tough old man, who, the world, it thinks it's passed me by, but you'll need me sooner or later," and like that, you know, I mean, like Tom Cruise is old.

Like all these, Keanu Reeves, he's old.

- Yeah.

- And like all these guys are like... - Still hot.

- The last, you know, 25, 30 years of action movies was this sort of... A friend of mine described it as like an untapped Mario board, where all the coins were still there, and so you know, that's a really nerdy metaphor, but that was sort of the thing where-- - I think we're in good company.

- Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[people laugh] Yeah, and so like that feeling where it's like, ah, there's this setup that the Zucker Brothers have created, but there's all of these tropes from the last, you know, 25 years of action movies that Liam Neeson is like a central part of that, you know, we're pulling from his movies.

We're pulling from Tom Cruise.

We're pulling from the Vin Diesels and all that stuff, and so having Liam at the center of it made it very clear as like we have this thing that we can do that is different and new.

- For at least, you know, 80% of the day, it was just us doing bad Liam Neeson impressions of saying these very stupid things and being like, "Does that work?

Do you think that's gonna work?"

- Yeah.

- Of just like what can we have this amazing Oskar Schindler say?

How stupid can we get, can we push this?

- One of the more popular parts of the movie is this snowman montage in the middle of the movie that like, you know.

- Yes.

- It's really this psychotic sort of montage that comes outta nowhere, and, you know, basically, you're in a hot, like a... You're in a bunch of different movies suddenly out of nowhere, right?

[Dan] You're not in our movie anymore for while.

- Yeah, and... ♪ Nothing's gonna stop us now ♪ ♪ Whoo, whoo ♪ ♪ I'm so glad I found you ♪ ♪ I'm not gonna lose you ♪ ♪ Whatever it takes ♪ ♪ I will stay here with you ♪ ♪ Take it to the good times ♪ ♪ See it through the bad times ♪ ♪ Whatever it takes ♪ ♪ Is what I'm gonna do ♪ ♪ Let 'em say we're crazy ♪ ♪ What do they know?

♪ ♪ Put your arms around me ♪ ♪ Baby, don't ever let go ♪ ♪ Let the world around us ♪ ♪ Just fall apart ♪ ♪ Baby, we can make it if we're heart to heart ♪ And that was something that the studio hated.

They didn't understand.

They kept telling us to cut it, and-- - They felt like it was an easy budget cut, because it was like, you could lift this, and the movie still makes sense.

- And they kept insisting it was gonna be like $100 million CGI, and we were like, "No, I will go down to Party City right now and get you a snowman costume, and it'll be good.

It'll work," and so that was something that like, I mean, just at every stage, even in production, they were still trying to like get us to cut it, and Akiva was like.

- "No."

- "There's no [censored] way I'm losing this," and we were very aware that it was kind of the best thing in the movie.

- We knew it, yeah.

- We love the movie.

We love everything, but it was always a thing that made us like just cackle, and so we were... So there was just no world where we were not gonna make it, but it was always a battle, and then to their credit, you never get this, after the movie was done, they apologized.

- They admitted that they were wrong.

- Yeah.

- Oh, wow.

- You never get that, but we got it.

- Meanwhile, the snowman and the TiVo sequence are probably two of the most talked about parts of that film.

- That.

- I think that speaks to taking swings, too.

- Yeah.

- I think that like, so often, like, you know, if you're making an audience for everyone, you're making it for no one.

- Yeah.

- But these are the things that made us laugh and were very particular to us, and they spoke to people in a big way, and I think that that's a good lesson when you're writing, whether you're, even if you're not writing comedy, but when you're taking big swings, and you're being like, "I find this to be exciting, and there's something that's making me feel like this is why I got into this thing, that maybe let's see this through," and I think that that... I don't think it's a coincidence that these two things which seemed the most farfetched were the things that spoke to people the most.

- Yeah.

- Oh.

[footsteps patter] That.

That's my TiVo that I lent you yesterday so that you could watch season one of "Buffy" so that you could start getting my references.

- I know that, Frank.

- And I specifically told you not to plug it into the internet.

- Oh.

- Oh?

That's an ethernet cord going from my TiVo directly into your router where the internet comes from.

- I was just trying to plug it into the electricity.

- And, now, they might be expired.

That means gone.

No musical special.

No Sander.

No Spike.

No Cordelia Chase.

No Daniel Oz Osborne.

No "Willow Meets Her Doppelganger" episode.

Nothing.

- Sorry, I didn't know they were so... [Frank tuts] Frank, we're in the middle of an important conversation-- [Frank tuts] - Just stand there.

[device beeps] [John] Yeah, there, I mean, the absurdity.

- Yeah.

- It's what's kind of missing right now.

- Yeah, well, especially with comedy, but in everything, but especially comedy, there's a lot of like sanded off kind of vibe to a lot of comedies.

You know, no shades to any in particular, but there's that moment you realize you're less like, "I kind of have seen this already.

This feels like they did, you know, 75, 80% of maybe what this idea is," and so it doesn't engage you in the same way, and comedy, more than any genre, like has to surprise you.

It's a physical reaction where you're like, the laughter is real or it's there or not.

It's binary, and so if it doesn't actually elicit that laughter, then you have failed.

- Growing up, I mean, I was obsessed with "Airplane!," and, you know, "Top Secret!," of course, "The Naked Gun" films, then there was sort of a drop off.

Was there a concern, since there hadn't really been a successful spoof movie that I'm aware of, for a time, was there kind of a concern about that or did that enter in at all into the thought process when writing this or was it-- - In doing, we did a lot of test screenings for this.

Again, in a comedy you're like desperate to see audience reactions.

- Yeah.

- See where the laughs are, but we would do these test screenings, some of them public, and we would register that people under a certain age didn't start laughing until like five, six minutes in because they had never seen movies like this.

- Yeah.

- And so they, for the first couple chunk, the first chunk of the movie, they were like, "What the [censored] is happening?

That guy just lost his arms?

Well, are the arms gonna come back in some way?

Like, is that his superpower, he's the arm ripper?"

Like it's stuff like that where there's a... It's a [indistinct].

- It's a language.

- There's a language that you... There was like an internal education.

Thankfully, like the trailer did a lot of that work to sort of educate to the concept of slapstick like that, but it's, you know, more a cartoon than anything else in that way.

- Can you talk a little bit about the process of writing this movie?

I've heard that you almost set up like a writer's room kind of environment.

Can you talk a little bit about that?

- Yeah, I mean, so we hired a writer's assistant, which is like, you know, not the most normal thing in features.

We both come from TV.

Like we worked forever on "How I Met Your Mother" and "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend," and so, you know, that process of like creating a lot and fast is not always the screenwriting process.

The screenwriting process is, sometimes, a lot more isolated and deliberative where we're slowly sort of getting through this thing.

We, you know, understood, to some extent, that this was something that needed a lot... I mean, the comedy, obviously, the volume of jokes in this movie is unlike anything in modern comedy, because you really need a cadence of jokes that's a lot more intense, and so we were just aware that we needed to be turning out material very, very quickly and a lot of it, and we went through multiple iterations of the story, and we spent the first, you know, several weeks just working on plot and breaking it like any other movie, where it's like, "All right, we have to have like a story that holds up and emotional arcs that hold up," 'cause that is the little trick of these movies is that... I take it as a compliment when people walk out, and they're like, "Oh, it was just a stupid comedy," and it's like, "Yes, that's all I want you to think," but like if the third act stopped having stakes or the emotional arc didn't matter, and you didn't care when they kissed at the end, you would've checked out like 30 minutes earlier, and so that is the little trick is that like you go back to the original "Naked Gun" and like you care, you love it, you're so happy when Priscilla and Leslie get together.

It matters.

You feel for them because you're invested.

[Beth] Is this crazy?

- It's been a long time.

I'm afraid I may have forgotten how to kiss.

- Mmm, mmm.

- Mmm-mmm, mmm.

[gentle music] [both hums] [dramatic music] - You have so many, as you mentioned, movies that you pulled from.

How did you kind of go about, I mean, that sounds like the fun of it.

- Yeah.

- Is kind of finding the tropes that you're gonna make fun of.

- Yeah, that was also very much part of the first couple weeks and lasted throughout.

We were constantly sending each other, you know, texts of videos of things we were watching, but we just sat in the room.

We were like, "What are these movies that we have to see?"

Anytime we saw something twice, then you know, you're in a trope.

You're like, "This is, okay.

You know, this has happened now more than once.

This is when the chief comes in and dresses you down."

- Yeah.

- Or this is when, you know, any of these scenes, any of these classic scenes.

- That line, the like, "Do you know what the Miranda rights are," like is, [audience laughs] which in our movie is a "Sex in the City" joke, but like it is directly pulled from I think-- - "Dirty Harry" - Two... or one or two.

- Yeah, I think it's one, but... - And he's like, "Dude, Harry, do you know what the Miranda rights are?"

And he's like, "Miranda, what?"

- Yeah.

- And like... You're like, "This guy knows what the Miranda rights are."

You're [censored].

So yeah, it was like we, I mean, happily pulling like structures and shapes.

That's the joy of a spoof movie is that like you really do have carte blanche to just steal.

[romantic music] [record scratches] - Oh.

- Over here Lieutenant.

[romantic music] [Frank] I had sworn off love after my wife died, but this woman was put together in all the right ways, face, head, shoulders, knees, and toes.

- Liam Neeson, how do you do better than that?

- Yeah.

[audience laughs] [John] Can you talk a little bit... I mean, he brings such... There's a shorthand.

- Yeah.

- You see him and you... You get it.

Was he eager to kind of spoof himself?

He must... - Yeah, yeah.

- He feels like he's having fun.

- He was... He was amazing.

I mean, from the jump, he had so much respect for the originals for what Leslie did and what ZAZ did with "Airplane!," and it got in, basically, creating a whole genre.

He wanted to do it.

He was the right amount, I think, of nervous in that he was like, "I wanna do right by it," but he came in ready and game to do this thing, and there was a joy of it.

I think one of the great things, also, was we worked with his stunt team, who he works with on every, the last 20 years, and his stunt coordinator, who's wonderful, did all the stunts for this movie, and they were so excited to spoof out of their own fighting scenes that they've been coordinating for the last 15, 20 years for Liam, and there was just so much joy, and you could feel almost a release of being like, "Oh, thank god, we get to make fun of this thing that we're doing that we love, but, also, we've been doing the same thing for so long," and I think Liam had that as well.

He was ready to like, you know, take that himself.

- Liam went on... He had this thing, he'd say, he said once, on set, where he was in the middle of doing something particularly stupid per the script, and they yelled, "Cut," and he just goes, he's like, "I'm Oskar Schindler, dammit.

What's happened to me?"

- Yeah, yeah.

[John laughs] - What's funny is he's doing these ridiculous things, but, I mean, you're shooting a drama in some ways.

- That's right.

- Yeah.

- You know?

- Yeah, that's the trick.

- And the action is maybe comedic, but, I mean, those action sequences.

- Oh, yeah.

- Feel like real acting.

- No, no, I mean that was... - They should look good.

- That's the DNA that ZAZ created.

You know, in "Airplane!," those actors, like Leslie Nielsen included, were just dramatic actors before "Airplane!," and, I mean, "Airplane" created Leslie Nielsen as a comedic persona, but before that, he was just a dramatic character actor.

- A character actor.

- And that was their... That was really the thing that they sort of pinpointed was like we just want to play it as straight as possible, and so you know, we really took that concept and tried to apply it to the filmmaking as well, where it's not just the performance, it's not just the actors, but it is the cinematography, it is the score, it is the, you know, the stunts, the action, and, you know, that's something that we felt, really, was another way to sort of elevate this and bring it into the modern age.

That there were these other aspects that we could treat really, really sincerely that would also add to the spoof of it.

- Well, you succeeded.

- Thank you.

- So you come to set with this 800-page thing.

[laughs] Yeah.

- And you're throwing alts out to people and-- - Yeah.

- Oh, yeah, like Dan said, people really hated us on set.

I mean, like they just... It became kind of scary to walk on with like an alt and you feel people be like, "Oh, these [censored] guys again.

Jesus, if I had to add like..." The prop department being like, "If I have to get one more coffee cup for these guys, I'm gonna absolutely walk off the set."

The only reason we were still allowed on set was because Akiva was like, "Nah, those are my guys.

Like bring 'em on.

Keep coming," even though people were like, "Oh, we got to get our days."

You know, you'll find that when you're filming the... The respect for alt jokes on a movie are just, there's very little respect for them.

They're just like, "We have to make our days.

Yeah, you got your fart joke.

Okay, let's move on.

We have another setup," and, you know, but-- - But it's the DNA of this movie mean.

- But we had to do that, and we'd it again, and we'd [censored] people off again if we had to, because it was like, "You have to get 'em," and we used alts in this movie.

We used a lot of them.

- Is there a math to the laughter, things not interrupting each other?

- That's a really good question.

I think when you first sit down to write "Naked Gun," your impulse is to write a joke every single second, and I think that we found... Once we also went back and watched "Airplane!"

and "Naked Gun," the importance, especially in the beginning of the movie, of setting the tone and the expectations, like if you watch "Airplane!"

again, there's the opening, and it has a funny visual is the jaws or... - Yeah, the jaws is loaded.

- But after that, it's very slow, and you're just setting up this kind of intense kind of thriller, and there aren't many jokes, and you're like, "Oh, wow, I thought I remember this being like funny from the beginning," and it's not, because it kind of is lulling you into the tropes and the tone of this genre that you're in, so much of it.

At first, we were like... And we read other... There had been other attempts at rebooting "Naked Gun," and we could feel the like, "Oh, no, this is really feeling like it's trying too hard in the beginning."

So there is a math.

It's not a perfect math.

- Even within the joke pacing of the movie, we are very aware that, I mean, that snowman sequence is also very intentionally placed there, because we've reached a moment in the movie where the type of joke, the type of comedy that we've introduced through the movie has probably sort of seeped in already, and so the audience is starting to get like aware of it, of the formula a little bit aware of that pacing, and so we were very aware that we are at a place where if we need to surprise the audience, we need to do something that is really not of that tone and pace because we need to stay ahead of the audience.

- We were aware of it, and that was also a kind of a test of like, "Does this feel like we're just doing a joke that is just, it's not, they didn't do it, but this is exactly their joke?"

And we had to ask those questions.

But, also, it was just about letting our own comedy stylings come into it, you know, like the snowman, like letting your kind of mind go a little free and being, you know, like when you think about the third act of the original "Naked Gun," and the tiger jumps out, you know, in the field or whatever, and, you know, like that's insane.

That is not like any style of comedy.

That's just [censored] crazy, and giving ourselves the freedom to go there, I think allows us to be different and have our own personalities come out in the movie, and then there were just things, again, that were smell tests of being like, "Does this just feel like icky that we're just like... Is this what you would expect 'The Naked Gun' joke to be, like the new 'Naked Gun' where it was just like we're doing an impression, a bad impression of ZAZ and what they would've done?"

And, again, that's just a kind of a feel thing, but we were very aware of it and being like, "What is the difference between honoring what they do and taking the DNA of what they created that's so amazing and that we revere and celebrate versus what is us just doing a cheap imitation of it?"

And there's no way of really knowing that.

I'm sure you could... People could watch the movie and be like, "Yeah, that's a cheap imitation," or "No, that, totally original."

You know, it's comedy.

We did get a note, kept getting a note back about, which we, I think, initially, felt was a lame note about like Frank and his father and his relationship with his father and like kept wanting to come back to like the emotional core of Frank and Frank's journey and his history, and we're like, "Oh, this is 'Naked Gun.'

This is not what you do" but then we kept thinking about it, and it was that kind of note that we thought was lame and kind of just felt very like wrote that led us to the Frank senior being an owl, the spirit of an owl.

[dramatic music] - Daddy?

[owl hoots] Help me, Daddy.

What do we do?

- We were like, well, if they're giving us that note, then that must be a trope actually.

If this is like the wrote note we're getting, then these things happen in these movies.

There's a dad energy.

There's a dead parent.

There's someone, there's shoes that need to be filled.

- Right, the need to constantly justify.

- Yeah.

- Why the hero has emotions.

- Yeah, the need to justify it.

- You're like, yeah, the hero's going on this thing.

- We were like, "Oh, okay, maybe that's a good point."

Frank wasn't asking for his dad to be an owl, but he got it... Sorry, spoiler alert, but he was asking for a sign from his father that what he was doing was right, and he was on the right path, and that his dad was proud of him, and I really like that runner.

- Yeah.

- And I ended up being, and that came from what we thought was not a good note.

- The joke about when Pamela Anderson is describing how her brother designed the device, and he says, she says, "He designed this device to calm people down."

[dramatic music] - Go ahead, do it.

[knob clicks] [gentle music] - But he was worried that it could be used to do the opposite, and Liam says, "Calm people up?"

And that was like just a little joke.

We didn't really think much of it, but it did really well at the test screenings, and we were like, "Oh, I guess, that's a better joke than we had registered," and so we built it as a callback.

We did a couple little reshoots, and we built it as a callback when they actually pick up the device to fix the giant, like world-ending McGuffin, the actual device literally says, calm people up versus calm people down, and so she flips it back to calm people down, and that it was a callback that worked really well, again, in a way that we only could have learned through test screening.

- Well, it comes out, it does great.

Critics like it.

- Yeah.

- Audiences like it.

- My dad a little liked it.

[John laughs] Yeah, a little.

- A little, let's not get ahead of ourselves.

- Oh, yeah.

- Yeah, his dad liked it more than your dad.

- I love your dad.

Can I get your dad's number?

- Is he looking for another son?

- We're looking for dads.

- Does he wanna say he's proud of Dan?

[people laugh] - But, you guys.

- It would go a long way.

- You're bringing the comedy film back.

- Thank you.

- I mean that's.

- Yeah, well... - Huge.

- We're just a couple of idiots just hoping to make people laugh, and we like movies like everyone else.

We wanna go see movies.

I want to go see comedies.

I miss it.

[typewriter dings] [Narrator] You've been watching "On The Naked Gun" on "On Story."

"On Story" is part of a growing number of programs in Austin Film Festival's On Story Project, that also includes the On Story radio program, podcast, book series, and the On Story archive, accessible through the Wittliff Collections at Texas State University.

To find out more about On Story and Austin Film Festival, visit onstory.tv or austinfilmfestival.com.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ [projector clicking] [typing] [typewriter ding] [projector dies]