The Right Men: Ivan and Jason Reitman
By Andrea Simpson, Special to Hollywood.com
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Wednesday, October 29, 2008
Jason Reitman: How did Animal House come into your life?
Ivan Reitman: I started producing films in Canada for small amounts of money. The first one was something called Canada Girls and the budget was something like $12,000 and it starred Eugene Levy and Andrea Martin. As a result of that I knew my voice as a director was comedic. [The publisher of National Lampoon] said, “We have this little show we'd like to produce and would like you to produce it for us. It's called the National Lampoon Show” and I said, “Yes!” And the National Lampoon Show turned out to have all the actors about a year before Saturday Night Live-- John Belushi, Bill Murray, Gilda Radner, Harold Ramis. It was the first time I got to work with this astounding level of talent. You could see that they knew they were the best things out there… I thought if there was a movie that was based on anything from that show then I could get to produce it and hope to direct it. Lorne Michaels, a fellow Torontonian, comes around and hires most of the cast except for Harold Ramis. So I go to Harold Ramis and I say, “Why don't we develop a movie based on this show?” We wrote about 15 drafts of it over a two-year period and we kept saying, “This could be the funniest movie ever made” because what we thought in our young arrogance is that no one is speaking this language-- the language of my generation, which was the Baby Boom Generation.
Jason Reitman: You told me something very interesting once… just keep making movies. You have to make movies that are in your heart because the truth is that you really don't know what is going to be a great success or your greatest failure.
Ivan Reitman: I think one of the problems with sort of the commercial forces of things particularly when you've had success is you start to get this weird double thing that starts to happen and everyone starts to throw a lot of stuff that you… so you have more opportunity, but at the same time you're getting more and more worried…My concern is that you don't get sidetracked in much the way that I did... although I'm very proud of the movies that I made, I wish I made more of them and I wish I was more free of the system. My sense is that you shouldn't be too worried. You should just go out and direct wonderful films.