Saturday Night filmmaker Jason Reitman received quite a critical review for his film from one of the original SNL castmembers.
During a recent episode of the Fly on the Wall podcast, the director revealed Chevy Chase‘s reaction to the movie, prefacing, “Chevy loves to say the thing you’re not supposed to say.” The film follows the chaotic 90 minutes leading up to the first broadcast of SNL in 1975.
“So, Chevy comes in to watch the movie, and he is there with [wife] Jayni and they watch the film, and he’s in the group, and he comes up to me after and he pats me on the shoulder and goes, ‘Well, you should be embarrassed,’” Reitman recalled to hosts David Spade and Dana Carvey.
As everyone bursts out in laughter, Spade said, “You couldn’t even write it better.” Carvey added that Chase “knows that’s funny, like that’s the roughest thing you could say to a director in the moment, or right up there.”
Reitman explained that he tried to rationalize Chase’s comments in the moment. “I’m trying to balance it, because, in my head, I know, ‘Alright, I’m getting my own Chevy Chase moment that’s 1,000 percent only for me right now.’ And from a comedy point-of-view that’s really pure, and that’s kind of cool,” he said. “But also, I just spent like two years of my life recreating this moment and trying to capture Chevy perfectly, and also even in the ego, find the humanity and give him a moment to be loved — no, none of that shit played. He’s not talking about that stuff.”
Saturday Night starred Cory Michael Smith as Chase, Gabriel LaBelle as Lorne Michaels, Rachel Sennott as Rosie Shuster, Dylan O’Brien as Dan Aykroyd, Ella Hunt as Gilda Radner, Lamorne Morris as Garrett Morris, Emily Fairn as Laraine Newman, Kaia Gerber as Jacqueline Carlin, Matt Wood as John Belushi, Kim Matula as Jane Curtin, Cooper Hoffman as Dick Ebersol, Nicholas Braun as Andy Kaufman/Jim Henson and Willem Dafoe as David Tebet.
Reitman said when it came to casting each role, he “tried to identify one thing” about every character, and for Chase, it was “an ego that needs to be humbled.”
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