Shawn Levy discusses “Date Night”

MakingOf: When you were working on the script for Date Night, did you envision Tiny Fey and Steve Carell?

(Shawn Levy): Well, I first came up with the idea while on “date night” with my wife, and a lot of the story came to me over dinner. Shortly after I started developing the script, I heard that Steve and Tina wanted to work together. From then on, once they attached, I was really honing the script for about a year with their voices in mind, certainly.

MO: Now, once you had them on board, is that the point where you start going out to find and cast your ensemble?

(SL): No. You have them on board, you get the script to the point where they and I like it a lot, and then you start going after other actors.

MO: Now how about someone like a Ray Liotta, who’s maybe not known for his comedic work, but plays it so well in this movie? For you, what kind of challenges does that present? Or is it just so much fun to see him do it?

(SL): It’s pretty fun. It’s also Ray Liotta, so he’s a little scary. He’s always a little Henry Hill [Liotta’s character in Goodfellas], you kind of want him to do lines from Goodfellas, so no. I directed Ray and sometimes I might have to—same thing with Mark Ruffalo—you know these actors feel more comfortable doing drama. Sometimes they need to be calibrated a little to make sure they’re not so intense that it’s going to step on the “funny.” Frankly, Ray didn’t require that much direction and he had a ball doing it. He and I hope to do some more stuff together.

MO: Now, Mark Wahlberg. I wanted to talk about his role in particular. It’s hilarious! Was he originally who you envisioned? How did he get involved?

(SL): Well, Mark Wahlberg was very early on my mind, because what you get with Mark is not only someone who’s right for the role, in that he’s very male and kind of simple and studly and sturdy in his kind of acting, but once that door opened, if it’s Mark Wahlberg looking like Mark Wahlberg can without his shirt, that joke starts right then. It’s like, “start the clock.” Before anyone says a word, you know and the audience knows that you’re not being overtly self-referential, but you’re dealing with an actor who brings with him 15 years of cultural identity as someone who we first knew without his shirt on. As a foil to make Steve jealous and Tina slightly flirty, it just felt like such a great choice. The fact that he wanted to do it, and that schedules worked out was just a homerun piece of casting.

MO: And they play it so perfectly. Did you go through rehearsals for that, or was it a natural vibe that was established between the three of them?

(SL): It was pretty natural. We did not rehearse. One thing that’s really fun about that sequence with Wahlberg—and frankly, in comedies, you’re generally using close-ups, either because you want to punctuate a joke or somebody’s not so good in a scene, so you cut to a close-up—but with Steve and Tina, Date Night as more two-shots than any other movie I’ve done. It’s got more two-shots than almost any movie I’ve seen, because a) the joy of seeing them together in a frame. They’re both so solid and have the same tone of comedy—they’re natural, they’re reacting in the moment, so you can just let stuff play in the two-shot, which makes it more interesting for the audience because I’m not telling you where your eye has to go. I’m letting you wander the frame, knowing that everything is strong no matter where you look.

MO: Now, in certain scenes, it seems as if it’s so their voice that I can imagine they improved it, but I don’t know. I’d love for you to talk about what was on the page before you started, and how that morphed during production.

(SL): It’s interesting because so many people have asked me if the movie was 80% improvised—hardly the case. It has their voices because I spent a year honing the script, rewriting it, bringing it to Tina and Steve, getting their input, rewriting it, bringing it back, rewriting it, bringing it back. I did this literally six or seven times. By the time we shot, this script had been vetted and tag-teamed by all three of us. So it had their voices built into the DNA of its writing. That said, we also did a lot of improvisation.

MO: When they were made up on the day, did you shoot what you originally had planned, and asked them how they felt about it?

(SL): Yeah, the way we did it—and the way I always do it with my movies—is you shoot the script, you do two or three or four takes, and then I’ll go to my actors and say, “You guys got anything?” “Yeah, I’ve got something.” “Ok, let’s do it.” That’s pretty much how it happens. Sometimes they’ll say, “No, I’m good” and we’ll move on or they’ll have an idea, but you always shoot the script first.

MO: How often do you think you use the improv versus the script or does it just depend?

(SL): It does depend. I can’t give you a percentage answer, but I can say that every key sequence has three to five completely improvised lines that are the biggest laughs of the movie.