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Peter Segal on Get Smart
By Fred Topel | Image property of Warner Bros.
Get Smart
Interview: Peter Segal Directs Get Smart
"Because of the tone that we set out to make, which Steve [Carell] and I referred to as a comedic Bourne Supremacy, we went after the people who would make those kind of movies," said Segal. "I've worked with Dean Semler several times. Deb Scott the costume designer won her Oscar for Titanic. Because we knew the show had an iconic look, the fashion back then was so sharp and the '60s permeates a lot of fashion throughout the decades, unlike let's say the '70s. So we went after as primo a cast behind the scenes as we had in front of the cameras, because we knew what kind of tone we were trying to set."
Segal has handled action comedy before, with the third Naked Gun film. That, however, is a completely different animal from the Comedic Bourne Supremacy.
"I think Naked Gun is the hardest kind of movie to do by far. What the Zucker Brothers created with Airplane, it's a real ballet of comedy. It looks easy but it's absolutely the hardest to do. Four jokes per page, so the scripts for those movies, that particular script was I think 135 pages but the movie was fairly short because like with Second City, you just don't know what's going to work. So we test a lot."
The Zucker/Abrams/Zucker style made its mark on Segal, but he could not turn Get Smart into another Naked Gun.
"With this movie, because I had done that film and because Steve had also worked with David Zucker on a television project, we both said, 'We can't go back there again.' Naked Gun was inspired by Get Smart, so it would just be recycling upon itself. We tried to bring our own sensibilities to this and give it a different tone. What I learned from David Zuker on that is make your bad guys bad, take your plot seriously even in a comedy. We bumped that up a notch even more on this and talking to Mel Brooks about it, that's exactly what he tried to do back in 1965. He said, 'Let's take 007 and just stretch it one inch further into comedy but give it all those stakes.'"
Maxwell Smart and the agents of Control still use some of the classic gadgets from the '60s TV show, but they have a different effect in a modern world.
"We had to put the shoe phone in and that was tricky because how do you make something like that that's so iconic and was really the ancestor of today's cell phone relevant in a movie like this. The cone of silence we had to put in and ironically, one of our visual effects supervisors said that his uncle is friends with, and I can't say his name, but someone who is very high up in the CIA. They said that the cone of silence actually existed and they used it in the American embassy in Moscow. These were plastic cones, one cone that went over the people and they played music inside so that the conversation couldn't possibly be picked up by bugs. As usually, they said, it didn't work."
Get Smart opens to theatres on June 20th.
For the trailers, posters, stills and more movie info, go to the Get Smart Movie Page.
Fred Topel
Sources: Image property of Warner Bros.
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