Related movies

• Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
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Related people

• Mickey Rooney
• Chris Columbus
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• Dick Van Dyke
• Ben Stiller
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'Night at the Museum' - Shawn Levy Q&A

Chris Tilly catches up with the director of Ben Stiller's new family flick.

Dec 21 2006

Shawn Levy has forged a hugely successful career directing low-budget comedies that make lots and lots of money. With the Ben Stiller-starring 'Night at the Museum', he makes the move into big-budget blockbuster territory, and Time Out recently caught up with him to discuss his highest profile gig to date.

Shawn, you keep saying that you're going to make a low-key movie and then with this film you make the most challenging movie to date. What happened?

I got lost on my way to a smaller movie. After 'The Pink Panther', I was looking for something smaller in scale, but more specifically something more than just a comedy, and in 'Night at the Museum', there was something about the story of father and son finding redemption in their relationship, something about the friendship between Ben's [Stiller's] character and Teddy Roosevelt, it just struck a chord in me, and once I got over the intimidation of doing a big-effects movie, I committed. Ultimately, the movie really is more than just a comedy and I think that was what I was really looking for, something that would be more than just funny. I think that 'Museum' has both a level of spectacle that I hadn't done before and also a certain heart that I hadn't done before, so it ended up being the most satisfying directing experience I've had.

That's despite the complexity of doing a film when there's so much special effect involvement?

Yeah, as I said, the complexity of visual effects was why I turned the film down repeatedly over a year actually. Chris Columbus, my fellow producer, gave me the advice to simply storyboard the movie so that I was clear about what I wanted, so long before I spoke the language of visual effects I storyboarded every major visual effects sequence so that I was able to hand it to my team and say 'this is what I want, I don't know how to do it to myself, but this is what I want on the movie screen.' I did that and found that about two weeks into filming I had learned the language, and now that the process has been demystified I would gladly go through it again because the results, getting what you want on that scale, are really satisfying.

Did the film go through the testing process?

Generally when you make a comedy you have these early test screenings where you show the movies to four hundred strangers and you learn about what works and what doesn't. As we were editing, Ben and I assumed we would be doing previews like we always did in our movies, because we were not in the business of visual effects extravaganzas, and the studio said, 'well, you don't understand, there's different rules for movies like this.' There's different rules for 'X-Men' and 'Eragon' and 'The Fantastic Four'. You don't preview visual effects movies because you can't ask an audience to fill in that many blanks. And we said, 'well this might be a visual effects movie, but it's a comedy first. We need to hear about what we have.' So, largely because we demanded it, we had these previews with 80% of the movie missing. That is to say, the major sequences had men in green suits and in some cases drawings of a Tyrannosaurus Rex. We knew that we were asking audiences to take a leap, but the movie scored astronomically high. The studio was shocked and we were thrilled, because that told us that the priorities were where we wanted them to be: that it was a movie about characters first, and a comedy first, and a visual effects parade secondarily. So the fact that the movie worked before we had visual effects was very encouraging.

What was it like taking a couple of Hollywood legends like Dick Van Dyke and Mickey Rooney, who have basically built a career out of being lovable and cute, and persuading them to be the villains?

There was some resistance early on, particularly to the idea of making Dick Van Dyke the bad guy in the movie. My argument was precisely the reason everyone was resisting it, which is that he is the most beloved icon of family film. I mean, he practically created the genre with legendary pictures like 'Chitty Chitty Bang Bang' and 'Mary Poppins', and I liked the idea of subverting that public image and frankly so did Dick, so he not only was interested in doing the movie, but he and Mickey came in and auditioned, which in a day and age where I have 21-year-old actors who have done a guest spot on 'Gilmore Girls' refusing to audition, literally because they're like, 'well, didn't you see my 'Gilmore'? I don't read. You saw my 'Gilmore' didn’t you? Plus I had that spot on 'Smallville', I mean come on, why should I audition?' I mean, literally, I can't tell you how many times, absurdly, some young actor goes from being someone I've never heard of to refusing to audition. So to have Mickey Rooney and Dick van Dyke come in... The thing about Mickey which made it particularly witty was that he needs large fonts to read, so literally Mickey came in and, you know, he comes in with that pugnacious bulldog energy to begin with, and he's got pages that are this big and he's like, 'How are yah kid? Good to meet yah.' Me and Ben were in the room and were like, 'Can you believe this guy who has this humility?' And also just the guts to say, 'I know I've got the goods and I am totally comfortable showing I've got the goods'. So yeah, getting these legends was totally thrilling everyday.

Were you not worried, given the eyesight thing, that he might trip over something?

He sees objects, it's just small font. But that said, even when we were shooting, if I wanted to make changes on the fly, which we often did on this movie because there was a lot of improvising, rather than issue new pages I would just shout the new line while we were rolling.

So would you like to do something smaller now?

Well, I really, really feel like I'm not going to find a bigger movie. But it is true that I'm not going to be the first person that a writer or studio will think of to bring their small, you know, kind of 'Little Miss Sunshine', which for instance is a movie I adored, and I'm not going to get those scripts. I'm going to get a lot of 'Night at the Museum' type things and, you know, it's something that whether it's Chris Columbus or Tom Shadyac or Jay Roach or any of the guys, frankly, colleagues of mine who are major, major guys, it's hard to take that sidestep and do your 'Rent', do your 'Dragonfly' or whatever it ends up being, and sometimes they work and sometimes they don't. But you know, I have a 'Jerry Maguire' in me somewhere down the road.

'Night at the Museum' is released on Boxing Day.