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Next Up – The Sequel to Night at the Museum: Lennon and Garant are currently at work on the script for Night at the Museum 2 and so far the writing team hasn’t written themselves into the movie. “We have not yet,” said Lennon. “I suppose if we were slightly smarter we would have. We were almost going to play Lewis and Clark in the first one and I'm so glad we didn't. They didn't do anything.” “No, they just stood in the background,” joked Garant. “Long days, long days doing that while Ben Stiller's being hilarious over here,” added Lennon.
Working with Ben Stiller: Lennon says Stiller’s a very hands on guy who is actively involved in the writing process. “He has a crew that he's made and he brings us in so normally, he brings us in when he's not happy with somebody else,” explained Lennon. “So we're kind of on his team. His notes are always to make things funnier. …He's very practical which is kind of where we come from. It's probably that we both come from sketch and television that is just like a very practical way of talking about a comedy.”
Garant added, “Like we asked before we started Night at the Museum 2, you go through and you pitch your thing. You go to the studio and the director and everybody okays it, and then they asked what he wanted out of Night at the Museum 2. A lot of actors would really send you a phone book of what they wanted out of it. What he said was, ‘Just make it funnier than the first one. I just want it be funnier.’"
Although Lennon and Garant aren’t allowed to talk specifics, they did let slip that it will start in the museum and there are a couple of new major characters – two very major new characters to be specific - in addition to the old characters.
The Pressure to Top the First Film: They don’t really feel it, or if they do, they’re not admitting it. “We didn't think about it a lot,” said Lennon. “Certainly I know everyone at Fox, in fact we were told going into it, ‘This is the number one priority for the Fox studio, for Newscorp this year.’"
Garant said, “The first one wasn't a struggle. The first one was really fun. We wrote it and they liked it. I think if the first one had been a struggle, doing another one would be really daunting. But the first one, we just did what we do and they liked it so you don't really feel pressure because you're just kind of writing what you like and give it to them. If they like it too, you don't feel like Murdoch's breathing down your neck just because everybody's kind of on the same page.”
“You don't think, ‘Oh, I'm going to try to write this so it's a blockbuster.’ It's just like let's just write some really funny scenes,” explained Lennon.
Believe it or not, it’s not difficult for Lennon and Garant to put themselves in a family-friendly state of mind while writing Night at the Museum 2. “People always think, like the Reno movie is R certainly, and it was a hard R, but it was mostly because anything you could see in a PG Reno movie is on TV every week and now every night of the week,” said Lennon. “So we just thought, ‘Oh, we'll take advantage of - we'll just separate it from the television show by content.’ Because everything else in it is the same sensibility. And also, our sensibility is the monkey peeing on Ben Stiller in Night at the Museum, and the Reno 911! movie where we're all pushing a whale on a nude beach. I guess it's all man versus animals, isn't it?”
“Man versus animals, man versus man, man versus man,” offered Garant. “…It's kind of the same joke. It's kind of the same sensibility, kind of what we do all over the place, just kind of different versions of it.”
