After playing clips from the action comedy Get Smart to a jam-packed crowd at the 2007 San Diego Comic Con, director Peter Segal was joined onstage by his Get Smart cast. Steve Carell, Ken Davitian, Masi Oka, and The Rock were greeted with thunderous applause before getting down to the business of promoting the film which is due to hit theaters in June 2008.
After soaking in the love from the 6,500 comic book and movie fans squeezed into the Comic Con's largest auditorium, Segal sat down - in a quieter environment - to talk about bringing Get Smart to the big screen 30+ years after its run ended on TV.
There are a lot of younger people here who may not know the Get Smart series. How are you going to attract a younger audience?
“It’s interesting. For about a year and a half, I was on Fantastic Four - about eight years ago - and I wondered the same thing about Fantastic Four. It was an older comic book property. It wasn’t as contemporary as X-Men. ‘How are we going to attract young kids?’ And you forget there’s something called a marketing campaign. And after the first few commercials, my four year old son said, ‘Hey dad, it’s clobbering time.’ I realized that’s how you reach a younger generation. So coming to a place like this and talking with people who love movies… They see Steve Carell, young people know who he is. Young girls adore Anne Hathaway. Young people love Masi Oka and The Rock. And my gosh, I don’t know why, but I see a lot of little kids coming up to Ken Davitian as if they’ve seen the movie. I think, ‘My gosh, what are these parents allowing that they know Borat?’ That’s how you reach another generation.”
Why wasn’t a movie version of Get Smart done before this?
“They tried. They tried for about 10 years. They just couldn’t crack a script. I have to really give a nice pat on the back to Tom Astle and Matt Ember. They came in and they loved the show, and they really captured the tone really, really well, and quickly. They made a believer out of Steve and me early on.
You always go in with a little bit of skepticism. You want to see it on paper first. You have to look at scripts as like fixer-uppers. You have to be able to look at it and say, ‘Look, it’s got no chimney. The windows are broken. There are no shutters,’ but you see something there. And people on the Internet have said they’ve seen early drafts and they’re terrible. Well, that’s like looking at a fixer-upper and saying, ‘That house is terrible.’ That’s why you bring in architects and contractors to work on it and fix it. It’s not done until the day you finish post because the final re-write is always in post production. You can change the tone of the movie; you can change the story in post. It’s a constantly evolving process and then when you work with guys like Steve Carell and Alan Arkin, who was one of the founders of Second City, that bring a lot of improvisation to it. How can you predict what’s going to wind up on film? That’s the fun of working with those guys. So it’s an on-going process.”
How did you and Steve Carell approach the Maxwell Smart character?
“It’s interesting because Steve told me… I said, ‘You know, there’re gong to be a lot of people who hate us for attempting to do a movie version of Get Smart. He said, ‘I just experienced that with The Office. People hated that we were trying to do a version of that great British series. And then when we came out, and we showed just a level of respect for the source material, and made our own.’ It was good [and] we won friends. And so he inspired me, because I understand. I am one of those people who adored this as a TV show and you don’t want filmmakers to come in there and screw it up. So we really paid close attention to the tone and tried to look at every detail possible, and really make this as close to the series as we could.”
Was it hard to update because a lot of the humor came from the politics of the time?
“Well a lot of humor came from the Cold War era, political satire, so we made sure that we kept our finger on the pulse of what was going on globally and incorporated that into our humor. It was really hard to figure out how to get certain gadgets, like the shoe phone and the cone of silence, in but we came up with what I thought kind of worked. That is CONTROL is situated under the Smithsonian, so that’s where a lot of the gadgets wound up. Ironically, as I found out later, that is where the shoe phone actually exists from this TV series. I didn’t know that. So Max, out of desperation, has to go and smash into the vaults and collect some of the gadgets in the movie.”
Were you concerned about trying to get the shoe phone in and having the story make sense?
“Yeah, you can’t do Get Smart and not have the shoe phone. But I’m pretty pleased with the way it worked out. It feels pretty organic and I think it actually gets used quite a bit.”
Why did you decide on telling an origin story?
“I’m working with Chuck Roven, one of the producers on this, and I thought his last Batman was just brilliant. It kind of inspired me and Steve at that point, ‘Wouldn’t it be great to tell the story of how Max becomes Max? How Max met 99.’ We wanted him to always be a CONTROL employee, but maybe show how he was working his way up the ranks and got his first assignment. I find those stories fascinating. I think it’s always possible to jump into the middle of the story and have everyone already together. But, to me, I like to see how they became [that way]. I find it more interesting.”
How about working with Anne Hathaway?
“You know, I have to tell you, Anne is amazing. She morphs in front of the camera. She’s kind of girlish and a little goofy, you know, on the set. She tells a lot of jokes and she puts on big thick glasses. She’s like that kid that you see in Princess Diaries. And then you yell, ‘Action!’ and she just flips her hair and you say, ‘Whoa, where did that come from?’ She puts Max in his place and is sweet and warm and tough. She embodies all those things that made 99 so great. It’s shocking how she morphs. It’s really amazing.”
