[Watch the video interview on YouTube here]
Film Courage: In comedy, how do you get the audience to care about characters?
David Zucker, Filmmaker/Screenwriter: The way we get audiences to care about the movie and the characters and in that expanse of time getting a satisfying ending is, well my brother always said:
First you get your hero up a tree, and
Second act you throw stones at him, and
In the third act you get them down.
So, you present a problem that the main character has and it can’t be just a physical problem.
It’s got to be an intrinsic emotional or deep character problem that he’s got to resolve.
So maybe he’s shy, maybe he’s this, but he’s got to figure this out. I call that the software plot.
The hardware plot is okay, the pilots are passed out. He’s got to fly down the plane. So that’s just hardware.
But what the audience really cares about and the only thing they do care about is that this character solves his problem.
Even the Marx Brothers really did only one good movie. I love the Marx brothers. They have so many great bits but they only had one good complete movie and that was Night at the Opera.
And Irving Thalberg at MGM figured out that the audience didn’t care about the Marx Brothers. They cared about the characters who were the opera singers who were in love and wanted to be together and wanted to get a job in the opera.
They had a great three-act structure. It doesn’t matter how many side trips the Marx Brothers went on. In the end, Alan Jones and Kitty Carlisle got what they wanted, they were able to fall in love and make it in the opera.
Everybody loved the Marx Brothers, but they didn’t care about the Marx Brothers. So that’s the lesson that I’ve learned.
Film Courage: You’ve said in Naked Gun, you’ve used Nordberg as a punching bag character. What is that type of character (a punching bag)?
David: I think Craig Mazin came up with the idea of the punching bag. When he didn’t participate in the…(Watch the video interview on YouTube here).
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About:
Born on October 16, 1947 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA, director/writer/producer David Zucker, along with brother Jerry (Ghost, 1990) Zucker and longtime friend, Jim (Hot Shots, 1991) Abrahams, has established himself among Hollywood’s (or at least Wisconsin’s) most successful filmmakers. Starting out after college, with a borrowed video tape deck and camera, the soon to be legendary trio created the Kentucky Fried Theater, on the UW Madison campus, and moved to California in 1972, quickly becoming the most successful small theater group. in Los Angeles history.
After parlaying this success into The Kentucky Fried Movie, the three conceived the idea that would create a whole new film genre. Airplane! (1980) broke all conventions, featuring dramatic actors like Robert Stack and Leslie Nielsen performing zany jokes with straight-laced sincerity. The spoof became the surprise hit of 1980, beginning a streak of hilarious movies including Top Secret! (1984) and Ruthless People (1986), after which David branched out on his own to direct The Naked Guns (1988, 1991, 1994), BASEketball (1998), Scary Movies 3 (2003), and 4 (2006), and others.
David also found time to produce the successful, but somewhat less hilarious A Walk in The Clouds (1995) and Phone Booth (2002), and recently completed a feature script, The Star of Malta, a comedy set in the Film Noir era, and an international spy thriller, “Counter Intellijence!”.
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