Shawn Levy discusses a key action scene

MakingOf: One of the scenes I’d love for you to discuss how you shot it, was the scene with the Audi and the cab, and I’m sure you you’ve heard this because I’ve never seen anything like it.

(Shawn Levy): That’s the point! You’ve never seen anything like it! That’s why I wanted to do it! It goes back to script development first. We were developing the script, and I know I wanted the movie to have action because I knew I wanted to do a movie about marriage, but I wanted it to be very commercial, so it had to have an action component. It was time for us to get away from the bad guys, and I really didn’t want to do another car chase through Manhattan. So I remember this thing that happened to me when I was 16 where I was parking and accidentally hit a car. I went to back out and somehow and I jacked the car up on my bumper, so I pulled forward and I pulled the car forward, forward back, forward back, I’m 16-years-old and I end up with this other car up on the ass of my vehicle! Somehow, we had gotten hooked, and it was this random, weird thing that happened 25 years ago.  So now, I’m like, “We’re going to do a car chase, but it’s going to be this freaky thing where the bumpers get hooked and it’s going to be a Siamese car chase through Manhattan.” So, I had the idea, wrote it, and immediately people were like, “Oh my God, what a great metaphor for marriage!” and I was like, “What do you mean?” and then I realized that I had unintentionally created this metaphor of  “You know what? I’m going to push, you just go with me; and now we turn a corner, and you push and I’m going to go with you.” That’s kind of what marriage is. It’s that push-pull, literally. So to have an action sequence that’s also a metaphor for the theme of the movie was an extra bonus; but because it was a stunt that no one has ever done, it took us months, and a lot of money, and a lot of minds smarter than mine to come up with the engineering of how you drive two conjoin cars at 60-miles-an-hour through the streets of New York.

MO: How many people does it actually take to make that happen?

(SL): Well, the people who did the bulk of the heavy lifting were the Transportation Department, the special effects department, and the second unit department. That’s 60 people right there—millions of dollars too, because what we had to end up doing is the car that is going backwards had a driver in the trunk peeking out of a hole, doing the driving, pulling the car that looks like is being pushed. So it was very, very complicated, but the fact that so many people are now saying “I’ve never seen a car chase like that” is fun. That’s what you want as a director—to give people something that is fresh.

MO: Now you talked about filming that sequence in New York, but I read that part of the movie was shot in LA as well. Can you talk a little about that and the challenges and benefits that each present?

(SL): You know what it was? There was an incident on another movie in New York City two months before we shot. It was a traffic accident involving a stunt car, so there was a real tightening of regulations as to what you could and could not do with a car stunt in New York city. So we had to take some of our high speed stuff and do it in LA, and then find ways to make it look really fast in New York, which we’re still allowed. So we did some of it on the streets on New York and some of if on the streets of LA, and some of it in front of a green screen in LA.

MO: When you’re in the editing process, can you describe for us what that’s like? How much footage do you go in with? Because I don’t think most viewers have any appreciation as to how much you have to start with.

(SL): Well, what you end up doing, especially if you are improv-friendly as I am, and certainly Judd Apatow is, and most of the main comedy directors now is using improv to a large extent. It’s in the culture of comedy now. The stars of comedy can, at this moment, are improv-savvy and improv-brilliant. So what I do is, first I edit the scene based on the takes that my editor picked, and I hone the rhythm of it. I cut out what I don’t like, and I kind of just finesse it and get a scene that I like. Then, it’s called “trolling through the bins”—we open up the bins, which are every single thing we shot from every angle for every line of that scene, and you force yourself (even though it’s tedious and tiresome) to re-watch every single thing you shot from every angle. Because, often times, you don’t remember “Oh wait a second, she did that thing where she made up that word, or did that thing with her hand, let’s actually put that in.” So first I shape the scene, then I go through the bins, and when I find little gems, I put it into the scene. That’s how you edit.

(SL): Then, you start showing the film to an audience, and you learn things that you cannot anticipate when you’re alone in a room. The audience tells you things: where they laugh, where they don’t laugh, where they tear up, where they go “Ahh.” You learn from that audience, you go back into the editing room and you reshape it based on what the movie wants to be—which you only learn once you feel it with an audience.