Jason Reitman Didn't Set Out To Make a Movie About 'Saturday Night Live'

"There's an age where you can drink, there's an age where you can drive and then there's an age where your parents allow you to stay up on Saturday night and watch Saturday Night Live,' says Angeleno Jason Reitman, who directed 2005's Thank You for Smoking and 2007's Juno before he got to fulfill a dream by serving as a guest writer and director on NBC's iconic sketch comedy show in 2008.
The four-time Oscar nominee helmed and co-wrote Saturday Night, the Sony-released film about SNL's inception that hit theaters Oct. 11. 'It's not that I wanted to make a movie about Saturday Night Live and decided on opening night,' he says. 'I wanted to make a movie about 90 consecutive minutes [before a show] and how people come together under pressure to create magic.'
Only in that there's a lot in Lorne that reminds me of my father [director Ivan Reitman]. They are two Torontonian Jews who were able to identify all this extraordinary comedic talent coming out of Canada in the 1960s and '70s. What my dad was doing in film, Lorne did in television. But both of them, their real gift was identifying exactly what was funny about other people. It's a tricky job — I think both of them had to realize they were not meant to be the person on camera. They were meant to be the person who identifies the talent, and gives them the showcase.
I just feel lucky I get to direct. I will never measure up to what either my father or Lorne Michaels has done. They introduced the world to so much comedic talent. I mean, you think about the number of actors that have come out of Saturday Night Live, whose characters are known worldwide, and the amount of songs that have come out of Saturday Night Live. Lorne Michaels has created and changed culture.
'Steve Martin's Holiday Wish' was a really important one for me, early on. Jack Handey used to have a bit about Disneyland that I thought was absolutely genius. It was always the stranger stuff that I really loved — and clearly, when I got a sketch on myself, my sketch 'Death by Chocolate' was completely absurdist, and I still can't believe they put it on the air. ... I grew up in L.A., so seeing Will Ferrell do the cheerleaders on SNL, after watching him do it at the Groundlings, was really cool.
If you look at what was on television leading up to Saturday Night Live, you're looking at holdovers from vaudeville and radio, and it wasn't self-aware. And by 1970, Woodstock had happened for music, The Graduate had happened for cinema, and within five years, SNL would happen for television. For the first time, a group of young people who grew up watching TV would see people who looked like them and sounded like them actually on television — who had their same sense of humor — and I think that's why it was such an overnight success.
I remember that sense of adrenaline while standing on the floor of 8H in the moments before the show, and that was unlike anything I'd ever felt before. And I wanted to capture that in the movie. I grew up in the film business, and I've always been interested in the people who actually put on the show. It's not one person who makes a movie; it's 100 people. And I liked the idea of making a movie about those 100 people, and watching them come together to put on a show, because that's where the magic happens.
HOPPER STONE/SONY PICTURES ENTERTAINMENT INC.
Fortunately, I work with a casting director named John Papsidera, who's an absolute genius. Ten years ago, when we made Men, Women & Children, Timothée Chalamet had never been in a movie before and we cast him. And people didn't know who Ansel Elgort was yet, or who Kaitlyn Dever was. John does all the Christopher Nolan films. You think about the cast on Dunkirk, or even the idea of putting Benny Safdie as that Hungarian scientist in Oppenheimer. My part was just boiling it down to the essence of each character … and [finding] that one thing in each actor.
I met Gabe at a screening of The Fabelmans, and he was standing next to Steven Spielberg. And somehow, next to the greatest director of all time, this 21-year-old kid was holding his own. His ability to be that comfortable in his shoes, it felt like meeting Lorne Michaels.
Yeah, I thought it helped. I really wanted to lean into the idea that this is a movie about one generation ripping television out of the hands of another. And so we very specifically focused on the use of this young cast, and the generation they were up against, which is represented by Willem Dafoe [as NBC talent executive Dave Tebet] and J.K. Simmons [as Milton Berle].
Dan Aykroyd, who I've known my entire life. I did just direct Dan Aykroyd in Ghostbusters, so I'm very familiar with his voice, and he's a genius. He's a genius in a way that you don't quite realize until you start rewatching all those first few seasons, and he's good in every single sketch, and he talks a mile a minute, and he's handsome in a beguiling way, and his brain is moving at the speed of a Corvette. We looked for months, and finally, one day, Dylan O'Brien walked in, and the cadence of his voice was perfect. That ability to be both handsome and charming and simultaneously so nerdy and lost in the minutia of all kinds of crazy facts: Dylan nailed it.
It all happened. What's crazy is that we interviewed everyone we could find that was alive in the building on October 11, 1975. … We want to know how it felt to be in the building. But then we're looking for details like, 'What did you wear in rehearsal? And what kind of cigarettes did you smoke? And what did you like to snack on? And who was sleeping with who, and were you smoking pot? And, who was an asshole?' You're trying to get a feel for what the life is, because it's not a movie about the show or the sketches. It's a movie about what it felt like behind the scene in the creation of this thing. The movie ends with the line 'Live from New York, it's Saturday night.' So it's everything that goes before it.
No, because it's not a biopic. It's not about how well they can replicate a certain actor. The job is to give the audience the sense of what it was like to create something groundbreaking. It's not that Gilda [Ella Hunt] has to sound like Gilda; Gilda has to have the empathy of Gilda Radner. It's about Chevy's ego that needed to be humbled. It's about Belushi's fear of being a star. It's about Garrett's struggle with identity. These are the things that make it real. And so, my advice to actors always is, 'You already know how to do this.' I write them letters before they start, and this is at the heart of the letter. And this is every movie I've ever made, is, 'Don't worry about the research. Don't over-rehearse, just know your lines, because you already know how to do this.'
Irvin Rivera

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