Interview: Jason Reitman on How Making ‘Saturday Night’ Was a Personal Journey of Turning Childhood Dreams to an Adult Reality
From the moment he was born, Jason Reitman has been surrounded by comedy. Whether being on the set of National Lampoon’s Animal House as a baby to hanging around and getting into trouble on his father’s set like Ghostbusters or Stripes, being the son of Ivan Reitman meant that you were going to be around the making of some of the funniest films of all time with legendary talents like Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Harold Ramis and so many more. Growing up on film sets, and seeing how movies were made, a young Reitman fell in love with the process of making films, so much so that it became a dream of his to one day be able to make his own movies. Spending most of his 20s making his own short films and commercials, creating his own style and visual perspective, Reitman broke through with his debut Thank You for Smoking, followed by the enormous critical and commercial success of Juno and Up in the Air, both of with landed him Best Director Oscar nominations as well as both films being nominated for Best Picture. He has since built a respected, wide ranging collective filmography rich in various genres, each carrying some form of humor with them that provides levity that humanizes his characters and makes his movies so memorable. But directing movies wasn’t his only dream, as he revealed to the packed audience at the world premiere of his latest film Saturday Night at Telluride earlier this year, that he other creative goal was to become a writer on Saturday Night Live and work in the hallowed halls of Studio 8H in 30 Rockefeller Plaza. He got to shortly live out that dream in the 2000s for a week and go to “space camp” to write sketches for SNL (one of which made it to air).
Close to twenty years later, Reitman has merged both of his childhood dreams into his newest film, which follows, in real time, the events leading Lorne Michaels (Gabriel LaBelle) and Not Ready for Primetime players up to the 1975 premiere of NBC’s Saturday Night, later known as Saturday Night Live. In a controlled runtime, Reitman is able to showcase not just the controlled chaos that is at the core of the 50-year institution that is SNL, but also find the core reason why we keep coming back to this sketch comedy show for the last five decades; because it is a showcase for where we are as a culture, and who we want to strive for as creative individuals, making its existence inspirational that Michaels and his team was able to pull this off with the deck stacked against them. In my review from the Telluride Film Festival, I declared that Saturday Night is his “best work since Up in the Air” and “a movie worthy of being a part of the celebration” of SNL’s 50th year on the air. I recently sat down with Reitman at the 2024 Middleburg Film Festival to talk about his early childhood connection to SNL, his week working on the show as a writer, deciding which stories and details to keep from the events of that night from 1975, working with his ensemble, and how the film was different, cathartic way of connecting with his father, inside a place and time that brought him and millions of people around the world wonderful, hilarious memories that formed into a entailed pillar of comedy.
Ryan McQuade: For everyone that loves Saturday Night Live, like you and myself, they have a starting point. Maybe it’s a sketch, maybe it’s a season where they saw it for the first time and were mesmerized. What was that for you?
Jason Reitman: I had a couple. Certainly, there was a moment early on where we watched it, and what I remember from watching was thinking, is this a once-a-year thing like the Oscars or the World Series? And coming to understand that they do this every Saturday. Every Saturday, they start on a Tuesday with nothing, and by Sunday they have a 90-minute comedy and music show. And I actually talked to Lorne about this very thing, and his response was wonderful. He said, “You can’t imagine what you can do in six days.” And this was a conversation that happened after we made the movie. But when I look back, that’s literally what we were making a movie about, which is the possibility of creation and what it feels like in a room when a group of people don’t even know exactly what they’re making. They’re just driven by a vision and by a date and time that they know it needs to be done by. I loved when I was actually there being amongst that chaos.
RM: I was going to ask you about that because you talked recently, that night in about you were in the middle of your post-Juno run and you got to live out your dream, the second part of your dream because the first act was making-
JR: Was making movies.
RM: Making movies.
Jason: And that was happening.
RM: But you got to do this week of writing and go to space camp, as you’ve previously stated.
JR: And I’ll even put it more literally in a way that I don’t think I’ve said before, which is that I got to start directing commercials really young. I started directing commercials right out of college. I was just doing Burger King and Outback Steakhouse stuff.
RM: Did you get discounts?
JR: No, you don’t get discounts for shit.
RM: So you do all that marketing and you’re like, I can’t get a free Blooming Onion or anything?
JR: No, no, no. And I actually remember thinking, this is great. I’m getting paid to direct. I guess this means I’m never going to submit to Saturday Night Live.
RM: So you thought the dream at that point was over, like that would be set aside because you got the other one?
JR: Yes, and it was happening. My short films are playing at film festivals. I’m getting paid to direct commercials. I have a dream of making movies one day. I’m writing Thank You for Smoking. Maybe one day I’ll get to make it. And I’m like, I’ve picked a track, and this is it, and now I’ll never wake up on a Tuesday and walk over to Rockefeller Center and work with these other writers until the sun comes up and live this dream on a weekly basis and try to get sketches on. And sorry, but when I did get to go after Juno, you’ve heard me say the joke, like Lorne said, “Yes, you can come to space camp.” And it’s exactly what it felt like. It felt like I got to go to the moon.
RM: And I guess then going off of what you just said, when you did get that call, and I guess you put the phone down, and you’re like, “Oh, I’m going to go,” how did it feel to be able to go and have that dream reopened for yourself?
JR: Thrilling and terrifying.
RM: Yeah?
JR: Yeah, because-it’s like, you get to dress for the Yankees. I’m just like, well, my first thought is I really hope I get a sketch in, but I was good if I didn’t. I knew that was a high possibility. And I wrote three sketches. One got in. And I knew the host already, which helped. But honestly, what I remember most from that week was the feeling.
RM: I watched “Death by Chocolate,” which is the sketch that you got on air. And also it was one of those traditional mini sketches that gets three separate segments and then played throughout the episode.
JR: Throughout the runner, yeah.
RM: Yeah, it was a runner, which was fantastic. Could you talk about maybe the creation of that, and what were the other two that got rejected? Do you remember what those were?
JR: I wrote one sketch that took place in multiple locations, which I didn’t realize going in was a mistake because there was no way they were going to build multiple sets on 8H. And so I made the kind of rookie mistakes that anyone probably would in their first week there. And then Simon Rich and I wrote a sketch all night long about a police lineup that was funny by virtue of him being brilliantly funny, but the concept wasn’t that original. And then I had this wacky-do idea “Death by Chocolate” that I had actually had for a long time, which was just a chocolate bar that has a taste for murder. And it’s just bizarre, and it was bizarre in a way that reminded me of the things that I loved about SNL when SNL went sideways. And so I shot most of it during the week with Ashton and Andy Samberg and Jason Sudeikis. And then we had one live element with Andy in a lumberjack outfit getting killed by the chocolate bar, and it was great.
RM: No, that’s wonderful. I watched it again last night, and it’s still funny. But switching to the film, when did you start realizing that you wanted to tell this story? Was this way back when you’re sitting there and you’re writing these sketches, being like, “This would be cool if somebody actually told the story of this place.” Or was this point of emphasis over the last couple of years where you just started pulling research together and realizing something could be done here?
JR: You’re a writer, you know this, I think the story chases you. I think as a writer you always have 10 different things that are noodling around in your head, and nothing is fully formed. And there were two things that I was chasing that suddenly coalesced. One was the desire to do a film about time itself, something in real time, and my love for being backstage at Saturday Night Live and what it was like watching that crew and cast form a show.
And then one day literally it’s just a light bulb moment. And it was just, oh, the opening night, the 90 minutes leading to the first time anyone ever said, “Live from New York, it’s Saturday night.” My father once said to me, “Don’t mistake your location for your plot.” And I think it’s easy to think this is a movie about Saturday Night Live, but it is actually actually Saturday Night Live as the location to tell the story of the moment of creation and what it’s like to meet 20 young people whose lives are all about to change, and who are they right before. And that’s something that’s always interesting to me is if you’re in the room with genius, do you know it right before they crack the code?
RM: I think you were able to really capture that spirit and that tone and the chaos. And really, at times when you hear Lorne talk, it’s this controlled chaos that was adapted and built over 50 years. But could you talk about any conversations you had with Lorne and Dick about within that chaos if there was fear that this is going to potentially not go on air?
JR: So we interviewed a lot of people. I don’t remember a conversation in which Lorne reflected on vulnerability.
RM: Did others?
JR: Yes, but that’s not how he’s wired. What was interesting is, and it’s funny because I think everyone always wants to hear, it’s like, “What did Chevy Chase think and remember?” And Chevy’s memory is clouded by success and the amount of things that happened to him in that first season. And that’s understandable. Whereas if I would talk to someone who was in the control room the first year, their stories were about Lorne asking for things that they thought were technically impossible. Because this is a time in television, and we show fragments of this to give the audience a sense of it is the way they did their credits rolling a piece of paper while filming it. That is the same for every image that appeared on screen the first three seasons really. So if they show a logo for the Blaine Hotel, someone is painting that, and they’re filming that live on the one available camera. It’s a fourth camera whose job is only to do that. If titles are going to show up on the bottom of the screen-
RM: They put it on a card?
JR: They put it on physical media. They didn’t have a chyron machine.
RM: Exactly. It’s like little letters they put on the screen.
JR: Yeah. Another example, they had a live Telecine machine for showing pre-shot clips. So a Telecine machine is something that you run films through it to turn it into digital, and it has a little camera to shoot it to digital. So when they were showing things like “Show Me Your Guns” and the Albert Brooks films, they had a Telecine machine at Rockefeller that they’re running the film through live. They’re like, “Cue the film in the Telecine machine.” It was running live and then going to air.
So one of the things that Lorne asked for that had never been done before was, he goes, “It’s a live show. I need to decide when we go to commercial.” Now usually that’s done at master control, which is on another floor of Rockefeller Center. And Lorne demanded, “No, no, our control room will be master control. We will decide when you go out to the country.” No one had ever done that before. People who had been working in the building for 20 years had not been given that kind of authority. Lorne Michael has just turned 30 years old, and they’re like, “Okay.”
RM: “Here you go kid.”
JR: Yeah. So there is something about his sheer sense of will that’s impossible to understand now, he’s 80 years old now. But as a 29, 30-year-old, he was able to convince them to let him do things that seemed impossible, that he didn’t have the authority for, had never been done before. And when you hear other people talk about it, that’s when you start getting to the vulnerability of, how the fuck are they going to do this show? And that’s what we wanted to capture, this sense of everybody being experimental, everybody is trying something new, and that goes all the way to Lorne and Rosie’s marriage, unique, experimental, 1970s. Why are we following the rules of everyone who came before us? And they created somehow a bubble of safety within Rockefeller Center to do things different than they’d ever been done before.
RM: From the moment the film starts, Lorne is on the run, and doesn’t have a moment to breathe. He’s getting Andy Kaufman. He’s trying to literally put the show together. He’s talking to the affiliates. Lorne’s running around everywhere, but his emotional center is that conversation with Rosie, and it’s just a second for him to breathe before he has to rush off again. What did you think of their relationship built off the back of this chaotic show and the 1970s comedy scene?
JR: I think they trusted each other in a way that I find really admirable, where the idea that you could have a husband and wife who recognize that they are more brilliant within each other’s orbit, and they make each other funny, and they make each other more powerful and talented. And yes, she’s sleeping with Dan Aykroyd. It’s like, “Who gives a fuck? That’s not what’s important right now.” They are not victims of petty jealousy because they believe in each other.
RM: Yeah, and Dan’s more worried about that than they are.
JR: Exactly. And I got a lot of that from my conversations with Rosie. And they respect each other to this day.
RM: You talked to all these people, most of them, depicted in the film.
JR: Yeah, anyone who’s alive.
RM: Exactly. There’s a lot of stories, old memories you put in the film. Was there anything that you found or heard in those interviews that you sadly weren’t able to fit it into the final cut?
JR: It’s more character-y stuff. Lorne was already good friends with Mick Jagger and Richard Pryor. Why? Why was this guy that cool? (laughs) And they came to his birthday at the Chateau Marmont before Saturday Night Live existed. You know what I mean?
RM: Yeah but that’s crazy.
JR: Yeah. Dick Ebersol showed up at his birthday party at the Chateau and showed up at 11:00, and Lorne wasn’t there yet because Lorne was upstairs hanging with Richard Pryor and Mick Jagger. And Dick Ebersol’s like, “Who is this guy?” And so there’s color, but there’s no, “This crazy shit happened.” It’s more like there’s lots of color on all their relationships. Laraine Newman got into an SUV with her boyfriend and filled it with everything they owned, got to New York City, and the car was stolen with everything she had in it. And so when she gets to New York City, she’s truly alone there. That’s always a detail I loved, but it’s not in the film, so it’s more color. Jane was the only one who was married. The fact that Jane was married and felt like an outsider also because she was married and everyone else felt like a kid.
RM: But that stuff would have been probably used in a more traditional way of telling this story rather than-
JR: I was trying. I had a moment with Jane’s husband woven into one of the shots, but finally there’s a moment where you already see how many stories are being told in every given shot, and this is just a moment where it’s just pouring over the side of the cup.
RM: No, for sure, but you set the parameter of this time, the 90 minutes before the first showing, so you have to fill it, but the real show, you have to make cuts.
JR: Yes. That’s really well said. That’s exactly right.
RM: You know what it’s like to have a couple of things cut. Some people know what it’s like to have multiple things cut over weeks and years that have been there. It’s painful, but it’s also when you see the final thing, you’re like, “oh, okay, it makes sense.” You hear that all the time from former writers at SNL when they talk about the process of their sketch not getting in.
JR: The moment you’re in the last 10 minutes of the show, you know you’re on the chopping block.
RM: And how’s that feeling?
JR: I think it’s just heartbreaking.
RM: And that’s where Billy (Crystal) comes into play in your film.
JR: Well, and that’s it. And we’re trying to tell the story. We’re trying to tell so many different experiences of what it’s like to be a part of that show. And Billy’s is heartbreaking. And you know it’s heartbreaking because it’s 50 years later and Billy’s had as successful a career as a human being can have, and he gets emotional every time he talks about it.
RM: It’s Billy Crystal. He’s a legend. But even he’s still like, “I didn’t get in.”
JR: And I think you probably heard me tell the story, but he is the only one who had a copy of the script 50 years later. And when he pulled it out, he flipped to the page, pointed to a blank page and said, “This is where I was supposed to be,” as though this was the moment from there on nothing ever worked out in his life. And it couldn’t be more untrue. His life bloomed.
RM: Within this film, you have over 20 different characters. You have all these stories going on with a massive ensemble. And it can be very difficult to have an ensemble like this with so many known figures and names within the culture, especially an institution like Saturday Night Live. When you’re talking with your actors, what do you tell them to do in terms of research? Do you tell them that you don’t want them to do too much because you want them to make their own thing? Do you let them make their own choices and bring that stuff to it? What was that fine line for you?
JR: What I’ve found about artists is that they innately want to do great work, and they will put more pressure on themselves than they need to. And my job as a director a lot of the time is getting people to relax and to stop being scared because it’s very easy to look at the role of Chevy Chase and scare yourself out of a great job. And Cory’s a great actor. He’s going to do the work. My job is to say to him, “You already know how to do this.”
And I find the more research they do, the more they talk to Chevy Chase, the more scared they’re going to get about letting him down, letting down the legacy. At the end of the day, it’s a role. It’s a role that was written on a page. And so when I tell an actor, “You already know how to do it,” I believe that 1000%. And I try to keep a calm, casual place where people can have fun. And I think that’s what makes SNL work is when you’re there, you feel like you’re amongst the kids in your grandparents’ basement putting on a play. And that delight leads to great work.
RM: Gabe is incredible in this film. So is Cory [Michael Smith], Rachel [Sennott], everybody’s really great in this film, but Gabe specifically, because he’s the glue, we’re following Lorne throughout this entire time-
JR: He might as well be carrying the camera. (both laugh)
RM: Could you just talk about the collaboration process of working with him, Dylan O’Brien, Rachel and the rest of the cast?
JR: I think one of the reasons I cast Gabe was the same reason Steven cast him in The Fabelmans. There is a dreamer alive in Gabe’s eyes that is almost impossible to find in anyone else of his generation. You look into his eyes, and you believe that this young man is going to do whatever it takes to make his dreams come true. You can’t fake that. You can’t learn that. He just has it. And I knew that for 90 minutes I could follow Gabe, and he could carry this film on his shoulders, and every time he believed, I would believe.
There’s a couple of things about Dylan. Dylan’s the son of a camera operator. Dylan is one of the few actors who understands that it’s not five people who make a movie. It’s 100 people who make a movie. And he loves that. He loves being part of the crew. He loves just being part of it. And that’s what this whole movie is about. Dylan also, we had a breakthrough moment where I just said to him early, I said, “Remember Dan’s on the spectrum.” And it just clicked. And that verbosity isn’t an accident, and Dylan allowed a part of himself to just come out of the cracks, which is the, it is the weird facts, it’s saying the first thing that comes to your mind, it’s being ready to machine gun dialogue out five sentences in the space for one. And once he understood the rhythm of that mind, he was there.
And well, Rachel, just add water. She’s a superstar. Rachel, I can’t think of an actress whose first three films excite me more than Rachel Sennott.
RM: Absolutely. There’s a moment in the film that made me very emotional as a Saturday Night Live fan, and it’s the ice skating scene, and seeing John and Gilda together. And it made me think of not just them, but it made me think of Chris Farley. It made me think of all the people that we lost. And I wonder if you could just talk about that moment because it’s a beautiful tribute to them, and another moment of calmness outside of the chaos.
JR: It’s interesting. It’s funny. One of the things I thought about when making this movie was Dazed and Confused. Dazed and Confused, it’s the last day of their junior year, but it’s the first day of their senior year. And this is a movie that ends at the beginning. And Dazed does a lot of that, this ability to feel nostalgic in the moment for events that have not happened yet. And Peter Rice came to me at one point, Peter is our producer, and he said, “I think you need a moment for John and Gilda as the two actors who won’t be there within a decade.”
And the scene all of a sudden hit me because I knew I wanted something on the ice rink because it is so nostalgic, and I associate it so much with SNL. And the image of John as a bumblebee on the ice rink is permanently etched in my head. And I thought, oh, Gilda talking about their future, a future that will not be, it’s not only representative of the two of them, but it’s the way that we always think back about our senior year of high school and just presuming, well, we’re all going to be here for our thirty-year anniversary. It’s like, we’re not. And you only realize that when you get older. And so you’re right, it’s not only about them. It is about Phil Hartman. It is about Chris Farley. It is all the people who we fell in love with on that show and then slipped through our fingers.
RM: Part of your pace, makes the movie move, is the score by Jon Batiste. What was it like creating that collaboration between the two of you to get the score that you wanted for the film?
JR: So, the movie is about a show that is created in real time. And what we got to do on this film, only by virtue of Jon’s genius, is create an original score in real time. Every day at wrap, our editor, Nathan Orloff, would come in with a laptop and show a rough cut to Jon, and the whole cast and crew would stay because we knew what was going to happen. He was just going to create. And he would just turn to his band and just start pointing at them and calling out literal just letters of the alphabet. He’s calling out notes and mouthing beats.
And they just start performing. And the thrill of that is that there are a lot of talented people on this movie. He is a true genius who is touched by God. And to watch him create in real time is to feel that crackle, the magic that I imagine is what it felt like in 1975 on the opening night of SNL. And as a storyteller, it changed my approach in that I’m now getting this raw live material that we can re-edit the movie to, and it changes the heartbeat of the film.
RM: Your last couple of films have been really interesting because you’ve been stepping into the world and time period of your dad (Ivan Reitman). It’s deeply reminiscent and nostalgic, and for this film, obviously your dad knew a lot of these people. He also was the person who introduced you to the show. Did the process of making this film make you feel even closer to him? I know you’re very close with him.
JR: That’s interesting. Yes, in some ways…(pauses)…I understand the answer you’re looking for. And if I’m going to be honest, not like making Ghostbusters. Ghostbusters made me think about my father because I was carrying this thing he created, and I felt that weight on a daily basis. And what I felt during this movie was him laughing the whole time. This is a film where when I associate my dad with this group, it’s my dad as a very young person. It’s my dad before I’m born. It’s my dad in his twenties, and he’s the same age as all these guys.
And he directed all of them in the National Lampoon Show. So he’s directing Gilda, and he’s directing Belushi, and he’s directing Bill (Murray), who joined the cast obviously in season two, and Harold (Ramis) and a few others. And he’s just a kid. He’s a kid who’s there for that moment of creation. And so when I’m making this movie, what I feel like is I’m presenting him his childhood, and I hear him laughing at what he used to get to laugh at as a kid. And it’s not about my nostalgia for early SNL. It’s about getting to feel what it would have been like to be in his shoes as a young person creating something in real time.
RM: Lastly, we’re at the 50th anniversary season of SNL.
JR: Yes, I’ve heard.
RM: I don’t know if you know, if you planned it that way. (laughs)
Jason: I did not. (both laugh)
RM: There’s always been this fascinating conversation right now about comedy and also about SNL‘s role in it. There’s people in this country that still love it like I do and still revere it much like yourself. But then there’s others that are like, “It’s gone. It’s passed its prime. We need a new way of doing comedy.” And this was the new way of doing comedy in the 1970s. Do you think an institution like this, 50 years later, is still the premiere beacon of comedy? And is it a place where you think that it’s still necessary in the culture?
JR: SNL is a completely unique comedy institution in that it is not reflective of any one person’s taste. Monty Python is reflective of very specific people’s taste. The State, The Kids in the Hall, Key & Peele, all of these shows are reflective of the taste of their creators. And as such, they are isolated to the five years when they were white-hot and represented culture. SNL is a vehicle not unlike the Continental Congress. They were building something that was meant to evolve and change over the course of years.
And Lorne Michaels, he’s the guy who built the orphanage for wayward comedians, and they have come in and out of that building for decades. And that show has changed every week and every year and reflected what we find funny. And as such, there is always a new generation who is going, “Pete Davidson is the funniest human on the planet. No, Chloe Fineman is the funniest human being on the planet.” And that’s going to piss off the people who think, no, Adam Sandler is the funniest person on the planet.
And that is what’s great about that show. What’s great about that show is they’ve never recorded their opening theme. Every week a band gets on stage and plays an original version of the opening theme song. And it has new band members, and there is a saxophonist who’s going to do a new solo every week. And it is going to reflect the times because that show was built to evolve and change. And it’s like your favorite sports team. Your favorite players are the ones who played when you were 16, and they’re the ones whose jerseys should be in the rafters, and that’s why it’ll be here for another 50.
RM: And it makes you fall in love with the sport just like it makes you fall in love with comedy.
JR: Yeah, but you’re not supposed to love all of it. Every generation is supposed to be pissed off that there’s another generation coming up behind them. And that’s the natural order of things. And Kate McKinnon is not supposed to remind you of anyone who’s come before her. Neither is Kristen Wiig. They are meant to challenge your view on what is funny. And I would argue that it’s up to the teenagers.
RM: Thank you so much, Jason.
JR: Pleasure. Thanks man.
Saturday Night is currently in theaters.
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