Far from a pair of stereotypically weathered witches adding eye of newt and tongue of bat to a bubbling cauldron to concoct a magical brew, sisters Nora and Delia Ephron are an urbane, sophisticated duo in chic designer suits with an eye for light-as-chiffon romantic comedy. Nora directed such frothy films as Sleepless In Seattle and You’ve Got Mail as well as co-writing the tart-tongued turns of phrases with her sister, Delia.
Their latest concoction is the big-screen version of the classic ’60s sitcom Bewitched, much easier to swallow than the usual witches’ brew but just as potent. It stars Nicole Kidman as a reluctant real-life witch cast as Samantha in a TV remake of the series playing opposite a vain, nearly washed-up actor (Will Ferrell) who hopes to hog the spotlight next to an unknown.
Can you talk about casting the film, and the correlation between the actors you worked with and the original TV actors?
Nora Ephron: “The truth is that when I got this momentous telephone call from Columbia Pictures saying ‘Help! We’re about to have a meeting with Nicole Kidman and she wants to do Bewitched and we have no plot, and you have until 11 o’clock tomorrow morning to think of something,’ the instant thing I thought of was not Nicole Kidman, but Elizabeth Montgomery’s nose, and how Nicole has the same nose. And I think if Amy Pascal had called me and said ‘We want to do Bewitched, can you think of a plot?’ I’m not sure I would’ve come up with one. But the nose thing was, for me, everything, because I felt ‘Wouldn’t it be funny to cast her as someone who gets cast in Bewitched solely because of her resemblance to the nose, this disembodied nose.’ And everything sort of came from that very quickly.”
Did Nora call you immediately, Delia? A frantic midnight call?
Delia Ephron: “No, I don’t remember when the call came in, but she did call up and said ‘Well, do you want to do Bewitched? and then she said ‘Nicole Kidman,’ and I don’t think she got any further than that. I said ‘Oh, yeah, it’s fine. I’m there. It’ll be great.’ And then she had this great take on the material. I always think that when you do a movie of a television show that’s so loved, so beloved, if you just do sort of an imitation of it, everybody-it’s a pale version, in some ways. I mean, Elizabeth Montgomery is quite perfect. And she’s a perfect television star. Like Mary Tyler Moore, one of those people that you have in your home. You love no one the way you love a great television star, because they’re in your family. And so I loved Nora’s take, which was to use the show, but to use a story around it. Then you still respect the show, without ripping it off. I loved that about the whole take that she had.”
How long did it take you to come up with a script that they could send to Nicole?
Delia: “It was hard. I think it was a hard script. It’s hard to do an original, and it’s hard to do an original when there are two of you and you have to agree on everything. It’s helpful if there’s something you’re starting with. It took us several months. At least three.”
Nora: “What I knew when I first met with Nicole on this movie: sometimes you can meet with actresses and absolutely know that they cannot do comedy, and that’s why they have never done a comedy, and that if you were foolish enough to ever make a comedy with them, you would shoot yourself. It was very clear to me that she hadn’t done [comedy]-she was only in To Die For, which I thought she was spectacular in, but that’s not this. That’s not this at all. But when you meet her, she’s so light as a human being, she has such lightness and charm, and it’s very clear that if we could put some of that on the page, she would be great in it. And then she, as we said, had a huge amount of input as to ideas she had as we developed the script: the innocence of the character. We felt that we had to write her a character to play. She’s an actress. In that way, she needs to get into something in a very complete way, so the innocence-Nicole was very helpful about that. And so all of her stuff comes out of character. Her comedy comes out of character more than anything.”
Did you have any trepidation about casting Will Farrell as a romantic lead?
Nora: “It works, doesn’t it? When Will’s name came up, I met him and then he went to meet Nicole, and it was just a sight gag, the two of them together, because he was dressed in unbelievably baggy plaid Bermuda shorts and this sort of baggy shirt, and the boats that are his shoes. And Nicole, who was in The Stepford Wives, received him in an all-red dressing room at Astoria Studio where she was wearing a white cashmere pencil skirt and a white cashmere top with this blonde hair and the perfect makeup. And I said to Delia later it was like watching an orchid meet a houseplant. And they were so different and so great together, so instantly adorable together-they loved one another. He was kind of just staring, because she is so astonishingly beautiful. You’ve met a lot of these women that look great on screen, and you see them in real life and they still look good, but it isn’t like this thing, where she just seems as if she’s got a light on her all the time. And she thought he was the funniest person. She had just seen Old School, and I think it was great for both of them. I think she thought ‘I’m not going to have to worry about the comedy because he’s gonna be there, and I think he must have-I don’t know. I know that Nicole gave him a believe amount of courage as an actor. I think he’s great in this movie and that you see both of who they really are. You see how darling she is in real life in this movie and you see what a dear person he really is. You see down to that sort of Will Ferrell, the Will Ferrell who everybody knows and wants to work with. So it wasn’t that hard. He’s like Tom Hanks. He’s great, and he will commit, totally. I think he’s just one of the funniest men on the planet.”
There’s a hilarious bit of dialogue Will has about a dog. Was that all scripted or totally improvised?
Nora: “Some of it was scripted. The Shakespeare thing he came up with, and the Spanish. It’s awesome to see that brain go. He does make stuff up–and he likes that opportunity. He likes to do it the way it’s scripted and then he likes to go off. Not that many people can do that kind of thing. It’s really awesome. It’s a privilege to be on the set and watch that. And in rehearsal, because I don’t really think Nicole usually works like that, he had her [doing it]. Some of the most wonderful things she says in the movie she improvised in rehearsal, and I know that was from being with someone so loose and so generous. It brought it out in her, too.”
Which of you takes credit for thinking of Shirley MacLaine?
Nora: “When we were actually getting close to having to cast that part, we had been surfing around on those websites, the Bewitched websites. And it is not that we didn’t think of Shirley, but what’s interesting is that they were very busy casting this movie. And they had cast Shirley in this part. It was totally the consensus that she was the only person who could do it. So we offered it to her, and she said yes. When she committed to it, that character was not a witch. But Shirley brings her own witchcraft with her, as you can imagine, and when we got done that character was a witch.”
Delia: “I think at the read-through when you go around the room and you all introduce yourself, you go ‘I’m Delia Ephron and I’m one of the writers’ I think she said ‘I’m Shirley MacLaine, I play Endora and I’m a witch.’ And I think she introduced herself as a witch right at the beginning.”
Nora: “I’ve known Shirley a while, and I really, really adore her and I think she’s brilliant. I don’t understand everything she’s into, to put it mildly, but she’s really smart. Smart about politics, smart about people, she has probably the greatest romantic past of any human being on the planet, and she’s willing to share it if you have any interest at all in knowing about Robert Mitchum, for example-which I do. She’s just had an amazing life, and incredible–never mind her previous lives! Her current life, she’s had about 40 of them. The political leaders she’s been in love with. You can’t imagine…I think you have to treat her with as much respect as you would treat any actor, and one of the things I know about an actor is that when they ask you a question about a part, it’s not frivolous. Not always-sometimes it is. But with Shirley I never felt that any questions she ever had about this were coming out of some urge to be difficult. And the first thing she said to me was ‘If I’m playing Endora, don’t I really have to BE a witch?’ That was the first thing she said when she read the script, and I thought ‘Well, that’s a great idea.’ So I think that if you’re open to what actors can give you, then it’s great. So I feel very lucky. I had Shirley and Shirley was great, but I can imagine that she might not be. But that’s true of many actors.”
How did you get such a pitch-perfect Paul Lynde-esque performance out of Steve Carell as Uncle Arthur?
Nora: “What I said to him was ‘I don’t want you to imitate Paul Lynde, just channel him.’ And I said that to Shirley, too. Of course, when you’re saying it to Shirley, you’re in serious, serious channel territory. Steve isn’t Paul Lynde, but he’s Uncle Arthur, also, you know? I’m always amazed at the number of people who are attached to Uncle Arthur who are not gay at all. He was a great character.”
There are some pretty savagely funny takeoffs on Hollywood in the film. With the ultra-vain Will Ferrell character, were you thinking of anyone in particular?
Nora: [long pause] “Yes.” [laughter] “There are a lot of guys in Hollywood who don’t want women to have any lines, and that’s why you see so many movies where the men have all the lines. And women play their wives and most of what they’re saying in the movie of course is ‘Why aren’t you ever home? I never see you any more.’ You know that wife that appears in all of the Oliver Stone movies. But basically yes, that’s one of the things that, when we started thinking of this guy who gets conned into doing this show because they tell him it’s going to be a huge show, it’s not that different from a lot of what goes on with these very big actors, where every scene has to be about them and they have to have the last line in every scene. And no matter what they tell you about how much they would like to work with someone else, they really only want to work with themselves. But fortunately, I’ve never actually had to make a movie with any of these people.”
Delia: “The great thing about Bewitched is there’s no way to make that about the man. It is a futile activity, because the witch has all the fun. The witch, Samantha, IS Bewitched.”
Nora: “You know what’s interesting that about Bewitched that we found as we worked on it? It’s a little teeny bit of a Rorsach for people in that some people say [Sony Pictures head] Amy Pascal thinks it’s about mixed marriages. Really. Can a witch marry a mortal? It really is about people with two different religions in some way. I don’t think of it that way at all. [Producer] Lucy Fisher’s great line about it is ‘Every woman wants to believe that her husband will still love her even after he finds out she’s a witch. But to me, on some level, it’s really about how powerful can a woman be and not throw a marriage out of whack? And that’s a question that’s just as interesting now as it was then, even though then it was mostly played out about the dishes and various things like that.”
Was there any thought to cast two Darrens?
Nora: “That was something that someone said: ‘Why not have Will be in the movie for the first two-thirds of it, and then just have someone else play his part, just appear and with no explanation whatsoever.’ We just bumped into Dave Chappelle in the elevator: Why not? But no.”
Where are you going to take the inevitable sequel?
Nora: “That’s the interesting thing. We don’t know. So if you do, let us know.”
