HOLLYWOOD CHICAGO: It looked like you had some seemingly dangerous cast members on this movie, in the form of the snake and Michael Cera’s wig, which looked a little scary.

TRIB LOCAL: Poor Michael Cera in that movie!

HOLLYWOOD CHICAGO: I know, he went through a lot! But did anybody misbehave on-set? Any antics or behind-the-scenes stories to share?

HAROLD RAMIS: I think everyone hopes that funny things happen on movies. They don’t. [Laughs]

 
HOLLYWOOD CHICAGO: You had a great outtake reel at the end there.

HAROLD RAMIS: Well, the funniest things happened on-camera, oddly enough. There were no pranksters on the movie. I’ve known people who were practical jokers on movie sets and maybe I’ve heard of some pretty elaborate practical jokes, but not on this film. And none of the animals went berserk or ran amok. It was hard work… You know, you’re warned as a director, at the beginning of your career, “Avoid the ABC’s of directing: animals, boats and children.”

MOVIE RETRIEVER: I always wondered what the ‘B’ was. “Boats” are the ‘B’, huh?

HAROLD RAMIS: Yeah, boats because you can’t control them… you can’t fix things in water. Things drift; they move. And I’ve done them all. No matter what warnings I’ve had, I’ve worked with all of them. But in this movie, animals were going to be a big part of it, in recreating that world. So, we hired a wrangler… Bobby Colorado was her name. A funny character, she lives in Texas with about 500 animals of her own. In fact, I had a 90 minute meeting with her when we were in pre-production. She brought in an animal book. “These are the cattle I’m looking at.” And suddenly, I’m shopping for cattle. I hadn’t had that experience before. “And we found a fox for you.” “OK, great.” “And I have a white lion. Are you interested in a white lion?” “Eh, I don’t think so. There’s no place for that.” So for every scene, from domestic animals that are all over the picture, and camels, oxen and all that stuff, to the exotics… even the owl in the movie wasn’t a piece of stock footage. We had our own owl. We rented a boar for the boar hunt at the beginning. You know, in L.A., you can rent a boar. “Well how long do you need the boar?” “Well, about an afternoon...”

 
HOLLYWOOD CHICAGO: What’s the boar’s day rate? Does he have his own trailer?

HAROLD RAMIS: Well we said we needed a cougar and it was like, “Oh, we got you the cougar from Talladega Nights!” This cougar has worked with Will Ferrell? Even I haven’t worked with Will Ferrell! I was impressed. Then the cougar wouldn’t do anything we wanted it to, not a single thing. So we had to animate the cougar. He’s CG. Even his face is CG. [Laughs] I said, “Here’s what I need. I need the cougar to walk out on a tree limb, jump from the tree limb onto a stuntman and wrestle on the ground with the stuntman.” “Fine, you got it. We’ve been working with him for weeks.” So literally, the night of the shoot – and when you shoot at night, you shoot all night, so you’re tired and it’s a big night and there’s a lot of work to do with the animal. “The cougar won’t exactly jump from the tree limb to the ground; it’s too high for him.” The trainers are telling me this. And I said, “Well, what will he do?” “Well, he can jump to a platform. He can jump about six feet.” “And then, he’ll jump from the platform onto the stuntman?” He won’t actually jump on the stuntman. He won’t do that. He can jump past the stuntman and you can put the camera so that it looks like he’s falling on the stuntman.” “But he’ll wrestle with the stuntman?” “Uhh, he won’t really wrestle with the stuntman.” Turns out the cougar was constipated and wouldn’t really do anything. [Laughs] They had to drag him with a chain even to get him out on the tree limb. So once out on the tree limb, that’s all we had, just a few shots of the cougar. So we literally animated his face. It’s animated when he snarls and animated when he leaps out onto Michael. So I have to say, everything proved to be true in the warning. We had oxen - what other job does an ox have than to pull things? Not these oxen; they wouldn’t pull. “There’s too much weight in the cart.” “But they’re oxen, you know? They’re big!” “No, they’re not used to it.”

 
I had a camel when I was shooting National Lampoon’s Vacation. There’s a scene where Chevy Chase gets lost in the desert and he’s starting to hallucinate and sees a mirage, where a guy goes by on a camel. And then later, he’s at a gas station and it’s not a mirage; there is a guy on a camel. So we’re ready to shoot the scene and I say, “Alright, cue the camel… Where’s the camel?” And they said, “Uhh, the camel won’t walk on sand; he’s not comfortable on sand. He was raised in Burbank, so he’s never been on sand before.” [Laughs] We had several of those situations. And then Jack is terrified of them. There’s a young lion and tiger when they come to the marketplace and I wanted Jack to walk by them. And he was like, “Umm, I’m not walking by them. What if they turn on me?” “We couldn’t even get the cougar to jump on a stuntman. They’re not going to turn on you.” So he waited until they cleared the shot. And same with the python… Jack was terrified of that albino python at the beginning of the movie. He didn’t want to touch it or go near it.

HOLLYWOOD CHICAGO: How did Cera handle it?

HAROLD RAMIS: Mike was OK. Well, it’s a fake when it’s wrapped around his head. That’s a rubber one that they animated. But the other shots were real.

HOLLYWOOD CHICAGO: And you had a fun quote last night, when you accepted your award that you often recommend people identify the most talented person in the room and if they’re not that person, go stand by that person.

HAROLD RAMIS: Yeah, right. That just made sense to me.

HOLLYWOOD CHICAGO: On-set, when you weren’t standing alone, who did you find yourself standing near and who did you find to be really impressively talented?

HAROLD RAMIS: No matter what, I can think of only one comedy director who does it all and that’s Woody Allen. He trusts his instincts totally, right? And he’ll have actors improvise occasionally, but I come from the kind of comedy where it’s only as funny and as good as the people around you. People think that directors actually tell actors what to do. But essentially, a big part of the job is hiring the person who’s already doing it right. Or already doing it better than you even imagined it. I’ve been an actor so when I write the dialog, I can read it in my head and decide if it sounds funny enough to actually take to the set. But god, if was only as funny as I am… I’m not the world’s greatest comedian, you’ve noticed. I’m not up there in the pantheon. I’m not carrying whole movies like Will Ferrell. You hire Will Ferrell to take your script and make it even much funnier than you thought it would be.

TRIB LOCAL: Well it seems liked there was a merging of sensibilities, to some degree, with you and Judd Apatow. I definitely saw hints of him in there with you.

HAROLD RAMIS: Oh, absolutely, yeah. We hired Jack and Michael because they’re brilliant. So my quote is true. In this case, I hired the most talented people around and then I go stand next to them and try to get them to embody the script the best they can. And Judd, absolutely. He was a juggernaut already when I started this project. He had become rightfully famous for television work that wasn’t quite successful, but was really respected. And then, his first film as a director… and then the films he started to produce… a great run. And it kind of echoed something we had experienced twenty years before. So I didn’t have any alliances like that anymore. I don’t hang out with [director/producer] Ivan Reitman, Billy Murray, and Dan Aykroyd anymore. We don’t make movies together. Everyone has kind of moved past it. But Judd’s now in the prime of that. These people spend endless months of time together, cooking up ideas and working on each other’s pictures and stuff. I’m not that prolific or that driven anymore.

So once we became friends, Judd invited me in with Knocked Up. And I had a little taste of it on Orange County. I actually had scenes with Jack on that movie that were not in the final version. But I was on the set with them. And [Orange County director] Jake Kasdan is also a Judd guy who has directed episodes of Judd’s TV shows. And he and Judd wrote and produced Walk Hard together. So that was my intro into that world. Ben Stiller was on the set the two nights I was working on Orange County and I had not worked with him before. So you know, all that was starting to happen. And then I was one draft into writing this movie when I thought, “I can’t do this alone.” I had young writers, two young writers who were both protégés of mine, Gene Stupnitsky and Lee Eisenberg. And that was a great connection. And they were already writer/producers on The Office. But I thought, “I need a partner, a real strong producing partner with a lot of studio credibility and a connection into the contemporary comedy world.” And who better than Judd?

 
TRIB LOCAL: On more of a thematic note, last night I was asking you about your upcoming talk in Highland Park [a north suburb of Chicago]. You talked a little bit about looking at religion more philosophically than in fundamental ways. And you had mentioned 9/11 and other events that really got you thinking. Do you think maybe we, as a people, need to laugh at ourselves a little bit more? Or need to laugh at it all a little bit more than we have in the past? Take a step back?

HAROLD RAMIS: Well, there are all kinds of laughter. I don’t believe in laughing with contempt at things. I don’t think my films – anything I’ve ever done – has been cruel in that sense. I kinda don’t make fun of people… I don’t know, can I even say this? Maybe I make fun of people all the time. [Laughs]

TRIB LOCAL: Or maybe have more of a sense of humor about things?

MOVIE RETRIEVER: You seem to create a pretty safe tone early on in the film that lets people know you’re not going to be skewering people in the film with contempt and in a mean-spirited way.

HAROLD RAMIS: Yeah. What I want for the audience is what I want for my own sons. I have a grown daughter; she’s probably older than you. She’s thirty-two and is a critical thinker…. she’s progressive, liberal and even radical at times. She’s a social worker in New York. I want my own kids, even though they’re growing up way over-privileged, to think critically about the things they’re told and what they’re being sold by this culture and by our government. So, I think it’d be a better world if people were more aware and thought and functioned more independently. I’ve read a lot of history and have been a keen observer of what’s going on. And I see that fundamentalism and orthodoxy just lock people into these ideological positions. And there’s no middle ground. There’s no common ground. It’s like, “This is what I believe. If you don’t believe it, you are wrong. You are the devil. You are Satan.” And we - on the other hand – are like, “They’re heathens. They’re pagans.”

TRIB LOCAL: It seems like the movie plays with that a lot. It’s like, “He is the one” or “He is not the chosen one.”

HAROLD RAMIS: Yeah, and for Jews, chosen-ness is a big issue. I had my rabbi come to the film in New York and he embraced me after and said, “Thank you for deconstructing the notion of chosen-ness.”

MOVIE RETRIEVER: Nice.

[Everyone laughs]

 
HAROLD RAMIS: He was thrilled with it in that sense. But you know, the movie’s post-denominational and post-ideological. It just says, “Whatever you believe, you know you have your belief. But it doesn’t absolve you from acting responsibly. And if you’re going to make meaningful social change, it’s not really because of your ideology or orthodoxy. It’s going to be because you’re willing to take action and do the right thing.  That’s all. Simple.

MOVIE RETRIEVER: I’ve got a more general question. Watching that movie last night at the Music Box [a historic Chicago theater], which is one of the bigger places to see a film--

HAROLD RAMIS: One of the worst.

[Everyone laughs]

MOVIE RETRIEVER: The sound was good last night. It’s normally not so great. It was pretty good.

HAROLD RAMIS: Well, what happened was, the festival rented a better projector. They brought in a new one. The best projector in the city was basically brought in and set up with better sound.

MOVIE RETRIEVER: Oh, OK.

HAROLD RAMIS: It’s a bad room, though. But you can’t fault the system totally. Because it’s a long, noisy room. It’s not ideal. It’s not built like a contemporary movie theater. There were no surrounds when they built that theater. No Dolby. No nothing, you know?

MOVIE RETRIEVER: So I realized that with the kind of movies you make, it seems they’re best enjoyed with a large audience, where the infectious laughter kind of travels around the room. So I’m wondering if you have concerns, as home theater systems get bigger and people start staying home, trying to approximate that movie experience by themselves or with their family. Do you worry about that?

HAROLD RAMIS: Yeah, oh I have that experience too, as a viewer. I think what happens is… There’s a kind of sociological component to it too. Older people don’t like to go to the theater. It’s a hassle, they have to go out. And there are theaters I go to, like the Landmark Theaters. The average – I’m young. I’m sixty-four. I go to those theaters and I’m like below the average. It’s a lot of older people. And they see serious films: foreign films, independent films and art films. And those experiences can be solitary. But comedy – especially youth comedy… young people, they’re not staying home, no matter how big the home screen is. My kids have an 80-inch screen at home, but they don’t say, “Come on over and let’s watch a movie.” They want to go to the theater, hang out, screw around with their friends and have a shared, common experience with people. So I think in the first run of movies, young people – our target audience – want to come out and see a picture and have the whole experience of laughing with their friends and trading lines on the way out. And then later, when people revisit movies, having had that experience, I think they then carry with them whatever that experience was and can laugh alone at stuff. And maybe now hear the stuff they couldn’t hear when people were laughing. And hopefully, in all our best films, there are lines the audience misses because people are still laughing from the previous moment.