Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
Michael Showalter is a journeyman Hollywood creative having a career year.
His three major projects in 2017 occupy distinctly different spaces on the comedy spectrum, and he’s playing distinctly different creative roles on each:
- On Netflix’s Wet Hot American Summer: Ten Years Later, Showalter is back with the Camp Firewood gang as the contemplative Coop (and Ronald Reagan) for the third go-round. He is also the showrunner and co-creator of the series with director David Wain.
- On Kumail Nanjiani and Emily V. Gordon’s film The Big Sick, he took on the difficult and potentially third-wheel job of directing Nanjiani in a film that Nanjiani and Gordon co-wrote about their own relationship.
- On Season 2 of TBS’s Thanksgiving binger Search Party, he is directing three of the 10 episodes and executive producing one of the most-praised new shows of 2016.
Showalter took a break from shooting Search Party to talk to Decider about what his year’s been like, why he went 10 years between directing movies, and how he’s managed making three projects with such wildly varying tones in such a short period of time.
DECIDER: This is the third time around for Wet Hot between the movie and First Day of Camp. Was the idea for Ten Years Later to do it again with a ’90s spin?
MICHAEL SHOWALTER: It took us a little while to figure out what it was gonna be — whether to do another 24-hour time frame, time in New York vs. time at camp, how big a deal to make the danger plot. We worked on a slightly different version for a while and were two-thirds into that when we started from scratch and zeroed in on a Big Chill/reunion framework.
Did you and David Wain come into the writers’ room with an outline, or did you come in more or less open?
We created the whole thing in the room. David came in a little later in the process after the writers and I had figured out the story. David and Jon Stern, our other executive producer, got much more heavily involved as we got closer to production.
The number of high-profile people who are involved in the show has to put a lot of demands on you in the writers’ room because you don’t necessarily know how long you’re gonna get someone like Amy Poehler or Paul Rudd. How did you manage that?
We keep the storylines pretty separated. Characters will be in pairs or small groups and go off on their own adventures and then connect back with the bigger group periodically. That was the case even in the movie, so doing that in the series has been in keeping with that. If you’re not being too ambitious in terms of production elements, you can actually shoot a lot in a short period of time. You can do a lot with an actor in a couple of days.
Bradley Cooper wasn’t available for this season, and you basically recast him with Adam Scott. Had you already written that part when you found out Bradley Cooper wasn’t available?
Right. We just added the bit where he says he got a nose job and was worried people wouldn’t recognize him.
Sarah-Violet Bliss and Charles Rogers, your co-creators from Search Party, have writing credits on Ten Years later. Did that come out of working with them on Search Party, or have you known them for a while?
They actually wrote on First Day of Camp and came back for Ten Years Later.
We’re in a period of TV where there’s a huge range of tones in comedy. I’ve had showrunners tell me about having tone meetings at the beginning of a project, but I’ve never seen one of those. How do you convey what you want in that meeting?
Tone meetings, generally speaking, are an opportunity for the producers to talk the director through the habits of the show. We don’t like doing closeups, or we like to do lots of closeups. We don’t do handheld. It to give the directors a sense of how we want the show to look. And we’ll talk about how much improvisation we like to do or how some actors like to do closeups first instead of wide shots first. In most of the tone meetings I’ve been to, there’s not actually much true discussion about the tone.
Where does the tone get established, then? The Big Sick has a dryer sense of humor, Search Party is more acidic, and Wet Hot is goofier. Does that come mostly from the script?
There are jokes in Search Party that you’d never put in Wet Hot, and vice versa. There are storylines in one that you’d never put in the other. The Big Sick too. All three of those projects are different worlds, and each world has its own internal logic that you’re trying to abide by. That comes out in the script, it comes out in the performances, it comes out in the way you shoot, the way you light, the way you edit, the music choices, the pace. It’s in every piece of the process. You have a vision of what you want something to look and feel like, and the tone is all through the way you execute that vision.
You’re shooting Search Party now. How many of the 10 Season 2 episodes are you directing?
I’m directing three episodes.
David Wain directs all of the episodes on Wet Hot. When you’re managing multiple directors on a series, is that less than ideal? Does it give you a chance to do somethings you can’t do when you’ve got one director for the whole project?
When you have one director for something like Wet Hot, the main thing it allows you to do is cross-shoot. You can shoot something from Episode 3 and something from Episode 7 on the same day, which is how you’d shoot a movie. There’s pros and cons both ways. When you’re using multiple directors, each director brings something a little different to his episodes. When you have one director, you have a more unified vision and execution.
You had about a 10-year gap after The Baxter before you directed Hello, My Name Is Doris in 2015, and then you’ve directed The Big Sick and a lot of TV in the two years since. Did something change that made directing more important for you?
Honestly, what changed is that I got more opportunities. I would have loved to have been directing for those 10 years. After The Baxter, I didn’t make the transition to the business seeing me as a director, so there weren’t a lot of opportunities for me. I co-wrote Hello, My Name Is Doris, was able to find a tiny amount of financing to get that made, and I threw myself into that project and reintroduced myself artistically. That really opened a lot of doors for me. Hello, My Name Is Doris what led me to directing The Big Sick.
How did that happen for Doris?
I co-wrote the script with Laura Terruso, and we sent it around to producers. Daniela Taplin Lundberg, who had been one of the producers on The Baxter 10 years before said she liked the script and would give us some money to make the film, and it was considerably less than $1 million. When Sally Field agreed to do the movie, we got the budget up to $1 million, and it was an opportunity for me to throw myself body and soul into directing a movie. I felt like I was making up for a decade of lost time.
If the technicals — the cameras and the lighting and the sound — have changed enough that you can make Doris for $1 million, why are the studios still trying so hard to make mainstream comedies for $30 million. A lot of comedies that have “failed” at that budget could have been made for a lot less.
That’s a good question. I don’t know the answer other than to say that, from what little exposure I’ve had to the studios, they want to spend $25 million at a minimum on that kind of movie.
How did you get involved in The Big Sick? Did Kumail Nanjiani or Judd Apatow call you?
I’ve known Kumail for a long time, and he was actually in Doris. He showed me the script and asked me to tell him what I thought, and I was blown away by it. I pitched myself to Kumail and Judd and Barry Mendel and Emily Gordon as producers that I was the person to direct the movie. They had all seen Hello, My Name Is Doris, and I think the felt tonally like Doris could be a good fit for The Big Sick because it was funny but had dramatic and sincere scenes in it and was a good example of what they wanted to do with The Big Sick.
I could see directing a movie starring someone who wrote it about his own life being a trap. Every dispute could come down to, “I know how it happened, and you don’t.” Did you have that discussion with Emily and Kumail?
That could have been an issue, and it wasn’t. Emily and Kumail at every stage understood that this wasn’t a biopic or a documentary. We were making a movie that was inspired by this thing that happened to him, and it was important that the movie be entertaining on its own without being a regurgitation of actual things that happened. They were both really open to all the changes that we made to make the movie more like a movie without compromising what was great about their true story.
It worked in a way at two hours that — and I’m not spoiling anything here — a scene between Kumail and his dad at the end of the movie worked in a way that I don’t think would have had the same impact in the eighth episode of an eight-episode series. It worked as a movie.
I agree. With a movie, you can make a more streamlined, focused statement. You have a very contained timeframe to really make an impact, and you can really punch someone in the gut in a two-hour movie. In television, you’re exploring an idea and living within an idea in a way that has multiple impacts but that may not have the level of lasting impact that you get with a movie. Both are really challenging and really fun to make.
Scott Porch writes about the streaming-media industry for Decider and is also a contributing writer for Playboy. You can follow him on Twitter @ScottPorch.
