Site created 12/15/97.		page created: 2/14/01 A Chat with Director Peyton Reed Peyton Reed seems like the perfect example all those of us who wish to work in the film industry should base our hopes on. As a student of film in North Carolina, Peyton dreamed of making it big in Hollywood. Right after graduating, he headed straight into the belly of the beast and found that the beast didn't pay too well. So he headed back to North Carolina, where he worked as a driver on the set of Bull Durham. In between pickups, he and a friend made a short film that opened all the doors he needed opening back in Hollywood. So, with his new film tightly harnessed under his arm, Peyton went back and immediately got a job with a production company making films about filmmaking. A master of the "making of" featurettes, Peyton chronicled the productions of the Back to the Future sequels, Braveheart, Forrest Gump and many other films. He then went on into the television world, where he directed the live action portions of the Back to the Future animated show, as well as The Weird Al Show, episodes of Mr. Show, The Upright Citizens Brigade and a couple of Disney's telepics, including the well-received Love Bug remake. This last year saw the release of his first theatrical feature, Bring It On, and I dare say Reed's got a great career ahead of him. I recently had the opportunity to discuss the art of comedy, smut peddling and redneck culture with Mr. Reed, so pull up a pompom and take a load off... Todd Doogan (The Digital Bits): Well... I do have a question right off the bat. Did you do a mime cameo in the film? Peyton Reed: (Laughs) Yes, I was the mime. Wow. How'd you know that? Todd Doogan: I was watching it and… Peyton Reed: Does it seem like the shameless director cameo that it would just have to be? Like... why the hell did that mime get a close-up, when no one else does? Todd Doogan: No. It's a good cameo. It's Hitchcockian, uh... you know. In a way. Peyton Reed: Well thank you. (laughs) In a very loose way (laughs). Todd Doogan: There's another thing I found out about the film that I wanted to get your take on... Peyton Reed: Okay. Todd Doogan: What do you think about your film being classified as "peddled smut" by film critic Roger Ebert? Peyton Reed: I think it's absolutely ridiculous. I read that in his Sun-Times article, and I was annoyed by that. First of all, no matter what you think about whether filmmakers read reviews or not, just because I grew up watching Siskel and Ebert on TV, I wanted to know what Ebert, and now Roeper, had to say about the movie. So I watched the show. And Roeper gave it a thumbs up and Ebert gave it a thumbs down. You know, of course there was a part of me that was completely disappointed. But beyond disappointment, I felt like if he had given valid reasons - because there are things in the movie that if you pointed to and said, "This doesn't work and that doesn't work" then I would have said, "Yeah, shit. You're right." But the notion that he thought the MPAA had allowed smut peddling, and then he used the movie as a launching pad for this article in the Sun-Times... I just flat disagree with that. I don't think there's anything in the movie that - and it's a PG-13 movie - I don't think there's anything, certainly sexually, that really presses the PG-13 rating. There's language stuff in the movie. And it IS a cheerleader movie, so you're going to see lots of skin. But I don't there's anything smutty about it. And to me, it really shows Roger Ebert's age and his lack of knowledge about youth culture right now. This is the guy who wrote Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. I assumed Ebert would have liked it, because there's certainly a tip of the hat to 70s exploitation cheerleader movies. We watched all of them. The Cheerleaders, The Swinging Cheerleaders, Cheerleader's Beach Party, Satan's Cheerleaders... all of this stuff. But of course, in the context of a PG-13 movie, I only wanted to SLIGHTLY tip my hat to that stuff. There's nothing in terms of nudity that should get the film close to an R rating, so I though [Ebert's take] was out of touch and weird. Todd Doogan: It was spooky. It says more about what he was thinking when he watched the film than what he was actually seeing played out on screen. Peyton Reed: Yeah. It's interesting, because I flew back East for the holidays, and was sitting on the plane with this mother and her daughter. And when she heard that I was the director of Bring It On, she said, "My daughter loves it. She's seen it so many times. It's so great that a movie was made with such a good message." It might as well have been a Disney movie to her. It seemed that this woman didn't get "smut peddling" from this movie. If she didn't, how could Roger Ebert? I don't get it. Todd Doogan: I thought that if you really wanted to be a "smut peddler", you would have tried to include the opening dolly shot in its longer form. Peyton Reed: There's certainly stuff that we shot, that you can see in the deleted footage, that maybe pushes it a little bit. More that anything, it doesn't bother me that I disagree with [Ebert], I just thought it was really out of touch. Todd Doogan: The only thing I can see that even borders pushing it is the one character that talks about where he puts his thumb when he's holding one of the girls up. Peyton Reed: Right. But that to me is reality. That's a very real horny high school guy character, and he talks about it and it's implied. And it's racy, yeah... but is it smut peddling? I don't know. You know, I'd like Roger Ebert to define, in print, the word "smut". I'm curious to see his interpretation. Todd Doogan: Hey... it's a great word. Peyton Reed: It is, isn't it? Todd Doogan: It's so explosive. Now, on the flip side of that, was there a REAL (wink, wink) reason for doing 21 takes of the shower room scene, aside from the one you give in the introduction on the DVD? Peyton Reed: (laughs.) Oh... I see. No. (laughs) Basically when, you have a scene that long, in the script that scene is something like two and a half pages, so you have a certain page count you have to shoot every day. We were getting that entire two and a half pages in on one single shot. Basically, what took so long was choreographing every little thing, as I said on the supplemental section. There were technical problems - people not hitting their marks, flubbed lines and all that stuff. And I, unlike some other filmmakers, I'm not really happy about seeing that I did 21 takes of that. For this type of movie, it was a really complicated shot on our schedule. I guess that's the only reason. (laughs) Todd Doogan: That's the official line and you're sticking to it. Peyton Reed and actress Kirsten Dunst. Peyton Reed: Yep. Todd Doogan: There's a slightly missing plot point that we see in the trailer, but not in the film. We see the Clovers in the school taking a walk in the hall. There's nothing like that in the deleted footage. Was there a plot point going on there, or was that something of a montage type piece? Peyton Reed: That was just montage stuff. The only Clover scene that was deleted, that I didn't include on the disc, was a brief conversation right before they come into the Toro's football stadium, before they had their little "cheer off". It was a really dull dialogue scene, where they were saying, "Gosh, I don't know if we should be doing this." And, "No, we have to make a stand and let them know." It hurt the pace of the movie but it was also dull. So I thought, when we trimmed that, we'd have them just walk in and come down and not say a word and do their cheer. It would be stronger. The stuff in the trailer, them walking down the hall, there were never any scenes with that in there. Todd Doogan: On a technical bend, you're really good at comedy. I think it shows with most of your television work, and somewhat here, even though Bring It On can't really be called a flat-out comedy. Is comedy based more on the "right" casting or is it all about the script? Peyton Reed: I think it's obviously both. You can have a great, beautifully crafted script, and you can cast actors who don't know how to deliver those lines, who don't know what's funny about those lines, what's funny about their character or have no sense of the overall tone - then it's not going to be funny. And vice versa. You can cast the funniest actors in the world and if they have no script, then you're gonna get nothing. There are certain actors who can improv and come up with funny stuff on the spot, but that will only get you so far. You'll also have certain actors who are really good at coming in and rewriting every one of their lines to make them funny, but actors don't generally like to do that. Hopefully, in the best-case scenario imaginable, it's a combination of those two factors. I also think that in certain scenes and certain types of comedy, there is a funnier place to put the camera. It depends on the tone of the movie. The style of Bring It On is this heightened reality. It's really "poppy" and colorful and in-your-face. It's definitely not a realist vision, but hopefully it's not too far over the top. Todd Doogan: You know, there's a certain punk edge to the film that I wasn't expecting from a cheerleading film. Peyton Reed: All right... I like hearing that. Todd Doogan: I liked it a lot. There was punk music, and a certain Valley Girl, punk-boy-meets-society-girl attitude. It was all about today's youth culture, but I also saw an 80s mentality. It's kind of timeless in a way. Peyton Reed: Well... that's interesting, because in the original script, the Cliff character is described as this "punk kid". And in movies like Valley Girl, where Nic Cage is a punk character - at the time, that was sort of different. I remember going to high school and there were maybe a handful of "punks"... and now the punk is a very different thing. There's nothing edgy about it. It's extremely acceptable. So the challenge was to come up with some sort of character who had the sensibility. We put the line in, when Cliff comes into class wearing The Clash t-shirt, and the idea that Kirsten's character thinks it's his band because she never heard of The Clash - that was one of those shocking realities. And that line actually we wrote while we were doing the movie because Kirsten, who was 17 when we were doing the movie, you realize she was born in 1982 and you realize that she has no idea who The Clash was - she really didn't. It seemed to work for the character of a cheerleader who would listen to modern R&B and Britney Spears or whatever. It works that she wouldn't know who The Clash was and I find that interesting. I grew up on punk and I'm a big fan of punk music, but I was trying, in the context of a cheerleader movie, to figure out how to make that work. Todd Doogan: When you're rewriting a film, because there's a segment in the DVD where you were saying that you were rewriting the film as you went along, and scenes were cut out because they didn't "fit" anymore - how does that necessarily work? Is the original writer doing that, are you doing it or is there a room filled with monkeys making those changes? Peyton Reed: I think that the dangerous and scary thing is, (the original shooting script) doesn't always work. Growing up a huge film fan, and always wanting to be a filmmaker, I've always read these cautionary fables about, "No matter what happens, makes sure your script is in shape before you start shooting!" Or you hear some horror story about some filmmaker saying, "We started shooting before the script was done...." And I said to myself, "I'm never going to get into that situation." And the first time out of the gate, I find myself in that position. We had a script, and we made notes on it and then the studio went ahead and gave us a start date for shooting. Now we have a finite amount of time to do the prep and everything. The way it worked on this film was, we started, and Jessica (the writer) put in a few weeks worth of work and then she had tons of other obligations she had to do, so we had to bring in other writers. We brought in a pair of writers for two weeks and they did a pass, then we brought in someone else for a week and he did a pass, and I ended up doing some writing as we were actually shooting the movie. Because at that point, none of the writers were down on the set and we were shooting and it had to be done. So we're shooting during the day, and I'm writing at night and I show up with pages in the morning... which is not the way you want to do things. A part of me was, at least when we were finished shooting, pleased that the movie just made sense in a way. And there were a few things, that I think I address on the audio commentary, which to me just don't quite work. It's interesting that certain people don't notice them and certain people do notice them. That's just what you're left with. The other thing is, in the deleted scenes when Torrance and Cliff have the conversation in the kitchen - that's one of the strangest things, because it's not just a scene we cut out of the movie. It was our very first day of shooting and by the time we had rewritten the Cliff character, and sort of gotten more into the movie, we realized that we weren't quite sure that scene worked. I figured we should keep the scene and looked at it when we got to the cutting room. I really resisted cutting it out at first, but now I'm really glad I did. Todd Doogan: That scene in the kitchen - the whole tone of acting is like two tigers in a cage circling each other and it kind of defeats the naiveté that helps float the film throughout. Peyton Reed: Yeah! It's very strange, because you can look at it, and I can always tell that it was the first day of shooting. They don't know each other too well and it's kind of like they were gearing up. It seems really stiff and like something out of a different movie. I even hesitated to put it in the deleted scenes. But it's kind of weird and interesting, so why not? Todd Doogan: Your background is full of behind-the-scenes featurettes... documentaries for the Back To the Future trilogy and Forrest Gump... Peyton Reed: I did production work for a company called ZM Productions way back and did tons of these behind-the-scenes documentaries. Todd Doogan: Did any of them find their way onto laserdisc or DVD? Peyton Reed: Both the Back to the Future and Forrest Gump pieces were on home video. I don't know what the status is on Universal's Back to the Future DVD package, but I know they have something big planned for it. Probably some of that will end up on that disc. I just heard from Paramount that they are planning a Forrest Gump special edition and it sounds like Zemeckis and all of them are going to do an audio commentary, which they never did for the laserdisc. Hopefully, they'll put chapter stops on the DVD because they didn't on the laserdisc. Todd Doogan: Because they meant it to be seen in one sitting? Peyton Reed: Yeah. With Zemeckis, it was a conscience choice that (doing Robert Zemeckis impersonation), "I don't want people skipping the Vietnam stuff - I want them to watch the whole movie straight through." But people are going to shuffle through anyway. Todd Doogan: Is that common - people doing Zemeckis' voice when they quote him? Because Hanks was channeling Zemeckis pretty well during his Best Actor acceptance speech at the Golden Globes. Peyton Reed: (Doing Zemeckis again) Well, he DOES have a very distinct voice. Yeah... that's my impression of Zemeckis. Todd Doogan: I want to meet him so I can do that too. Peyton Reed: Well, you can just quote me and say this is my impersonation of Peyton Reed doing Tom Hanks doing Robert Zemeckis. Uhm... so I think my stuff will end up on the Forrest Gump DVD. Occasionally, these weird things pop up, like on the Braveheart DVD. I worked on that DVD, but all I did was the Mel Gibson interview. So, that's me interviewing Mel Gibson on the Braveheart DVD. I did tons of those things. It was really interesting, because you get paid to go out and watch these filmmakers work and it was like a paid internship. On Gump, we shot 16mm film and we were on for 30 days, which was insane, just hanging out and watching them make a movie. For me, it was film camp or something. Todd Doogan: How did that education, of shooting behind-the-scenes features, help you with what you're doing today? Peyton Reed: It was a great learning experience, just watching those filmmakers and seeing how they worked - not only how they did technically, but how they worked with actors - the general tone they set on movie sets. And you see certain filmmakers and say, "Yeah... okay, that's great. I like that. I want to try that someday." Then you see other filmmakers and go, "Oooh... God, I can't believe that guy is doing that." You kind of learn what not to do and what's not working. Then, in terms of our work, just putting together the documentary was a learning experience. To be honest, they're promotional tools. What I like so much about the stuff coming out on DVD - if you look at the Magnolia disc, they have a whole separate disc that's nothing but a long documentary, where clearly it's a friend of Paul Thomas Anderson doing it. And he not only gets the funny stuff, but he's around when the shit's hitting the fan. With the promotional stuff, when that stuff is happening, yeah... sometimes you film it, but it would never end up in the piece. Because (donning studio brass voice), "We don't want to give people a bad impression." You'd have these heated arguments about it, because that stuff is real. People want to see how a movie is made. They understand that these two people like each other, they're just in the middle of a creative moment and they're arguing their points. It's rare that those things had much controversial stuff. Reed and Dunst on the set of Bring It On. Todd Doogan: Where do you think Kirsten Dunst's character Torrance is going to be in 10 years? Peyton Reed: (laughs) Todd Doogan: Seriously... when I watched the film, I wondered at the end where a girl like this finds herself at the age of 28. Peyton Reed: What the interesting thing is, and this is a roundabout way to answer the question but I'll do it anyway, after having done this movie, I've found it rather interesting the number of people, both male and female, who've come up to me and said, "I really loved the movie, and I have to be honest with you - I had really low expectations but I really liked it. I thought it was really fun, and I have a confession to make - I was actually a cheerleader in high school." Some of the most unexpected people - these really cynical movie executives and production women - say this, and I'm like, "YOU were a cheerleader?" It's amazing, because I love when people in reviews have used the term "guilty pleasure" about this movie. The idea, like with guys especially - that they wouldn't be caught dead in a theater seeing it buy themselves so they had to get people to go with them. I love that idea. But Torrance could really end up being anything. I would have answered that question before doing the movie by saying, "Yeah, she's going to end up being married way too young and have a couple of kids and have a horrible divorce, only to realize that she's taken the classic beauty queen arch through her life." But now, having spent time with a lot of these kids, I'm finding out that they really are normal, well-adjusted people. They do cheerleading, and they pour their life into it for a period of time, and then they're done with it and move on. She could end up being anything. Todd Doogan: That wouldn't be a very thrilling sequel. Not much comedy in that. Maybe she should go on and be the founder of a cheerleading college or something like that. Peyton Reed: That wasn't a very funny answer was it? Hmmm. Yeah... there's nothing funny about that. Todd Doogan: Okay... one last question and I'll let you go. You have to tell me all about East Bound and Down. I'm a huge Smokey and the Bandit fan. Peyton Reed: Well... East Bound and Down is a project that started life as a remake of Smokey and the Bandit. There was a script that Adam Hertz, who wrote American Pie, wrote. I read it and there were things I liked about it, but there were things I wasn't so crazy about, so I went in and said I was interested in the project and pitched a different version. Imagine you have Owen Wilson - and this movie has to acknowledge that there's 25 or so years since the original and how the South has changed and how we've lived not just through Smokey and the Bandit, but a couple of sequels, knock offs and The Dukes of Hazard. It's part of our culture. So, there's this guy who's somewhat of a loser and he fancies himself this kind of Bandit character, but only in his own head. No one else buys him as that. And the idea is to create a comedy based around Owen Wilson as The Bandit. We've got this guy, Brent Forrester, who's a writer on The Simpsons, The Ben Stiller Show and King of the Hill, and he's doing a new draft of the script and we keep meeting with Owen, and Owen is giving his input. So it's in development now. It'll be a post-strike movie, so that's the status. I'm actually supposed to get the first pages from Brent either today or tomorrow, so that should be fun. I just want to do a smart, revisionist, redneck chase movie... so we'll see. --end-- On behalf of The Digital Bits, I'd like to thank Peyton for taking the time to talk with us. I'd also like to thank everyone at MPRM and Universal Home Video for their help in arranging the interview. Be sure to read my review of Bring It On on DVD. Definitely check this film out. Todd Doogan todddoogan@thedigitalbits.com
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