CraveOnline: We won’t spoil the scene, but you have a real grudge match reunion in the movie. Is this the first time those two athletes have been in the same room together since?
Peter Segal: It is, it is. That was again a great idea, the same as the idea of casting De Niro and Stallone in this. Then the challenge was getting those two guys in the same room and how they would respond to each other. Were they going to kill each other? The results were very surprising.
It’s only a minute in the movie but how did it go on the day?
On the day, we had very little time to shoot because Kevin Hart’s schedule, he had to be done by 10 AM and we had two scenes to shoot. Those guys showed up on time, incredibly cordial and brought something to it that no one expected.
So no old beef came up?
Not to my eyes. Since then, they’ve been I think capitalizing on it, doing a couple of commercials but we were the first in there.
Was the Twitter and viral video angle always in the script?
Yes, that’s something that’s here today and that’s a big thing. How to motivate these two characters to get back in the ring was very tricky. Something that we have today that we didn’t have 10 years ago is things going viral, the internet and how it’s used with Twitter so we realized that that could be a story point.
Did you hear that Ed Helms has been cast in a Naked Gun remake?
I did. I love Ed and that sounds like a great idea. Those are really hard movies to do but it’s exciting to see.
They are and I love Ed too, but how do you do a Naked Gun movie without either Leslie Nielsen or The Zucker Brothers?
Good question. I don’t know but never say never. He’s a great guy and a very funny guy. If they get the script right, the thing about those Naked Guns is they’re a lot harder than they look. The Naked Gun I did was the hardest movie of my career because they are incredibly finely tuned ballets of physical comedy. Background jokes have to work in sync with something going on in the foreground, while double entendres are going. There are always layers to every scene and layers to the jokes and if the rhythm of those layers don’t work and if you don’t treat it incredibly dramatic, often there are a lot of spoof movies that just don’t work and are terrible.
They’re not doing that style at all.
No, they don’t do it because they’re not paying attention to the discipline that you need to make one of those movies work. You think about the brilliance of what the Zucker Brothers did with the first Airplane that David transferred over into The Naked Gun, he took a completely dramatic cast, basically B television stars that had never done comedy before, and made them look like they were the funniest people on the planet. Leslie Nielsen was not hilarious, but David made him hilarious and I learned that when I inherited the cast on Naked Gun that the genius there was really him.
The crazy thing is both Nielsen and David wanted to do a Naked Gun 4. I want to know why we didn’t get that movie while Leslie was still with us.
Well, I think because Leslie was pushing 90 at that point. I think they didn’t get any traction with a fourth Naked Gun so they transferred their relationship over into the Scary Movie franchise.
What ever happened to the Shazam movie?
Well, Shazam has always been plagued by a competitiveness with Superman. Going back to the 1930s when Shazam became the most popular comic on the planet and DC comics enjoined Fawcett Comics. Because there were some powers that Captain Marvel had that were similar to Superman, years later they bought Fawcett Comics so Shazam became a DC property. We had a shot. We wrote a very good screenplay a few years ago and after the Bryan Singer version of Superman [Returns], which did okay, if Superman continued to meander and not move forward, there was room for Shazam. But, the last Superman did so well, it’s going to be tough to see Captain Marvel take flight. We’ll see. You never know.
Are you attached to a remake of Harvey?
Mm-hmm, I am. There’s a fantastic young writer named Jonathan Tropper who does “Banshee” right now. He did a marvelous retelling the story that contemporized the great 1956 Jimmy Stewart classic. It’s very daunting at first to think about redoing that movie and to watch the original, and then saw the rewrite and realized that there absolutely is a place.
If One Finger Salute is still one of your projects, is that based on a real story? Was there really a group of pilots trying to go into space before NASA?
Yes. As a matter of fact, Felix Baumgartner’s jump from the edge of space recently, the Red Bull thing which had over 30 million people tune in to the live stream on the internet, only revitalized that story because one of the characters, Kittinger, turned out to be his coach. He was basically in Houston control and it was Baumgartner’s jump that broke Kittinger’s records from the ‘50s and ‘60s.
Fred Topel is a staff writer at CraveOnline and the man behind Best Episode Ever and The Shelf Space Awards. Follow him on Twitter at @FredTopel.
