The Special Effects Comedy Genre: Has it changed a lot since director Ivan Reitman did Ghostbusters? “I don't know,” said Reitman, “I think it’s been done now. What was wonderful about Ghostbusters, no one had ever quite seen it before and that was a wonderful tool to have. In fact, on this movie, I probably underplay it more than anything else. I think this really is a comedy, the emphasis being on comedy - or romantic comedy - that happens to have as one of its characters, somebody with special powers. The way to show that, of course, [is] I need special effects.”
Reitman tried not to allow the effects to overwhelm the comedy. “I tried to balance it where I try to put the emphasis on both the comedy and sort of the real life aspects of this movie,” explained Reitman. “I think these are all real people in a real world. It’s not Metropolis or Gotham. It’s New York. I tried to make the characters, as I usually do in my movies, sort of fully dimensional, full-blooded sort of people that we understand and like to watch. And play the comedy out of that. For me it was a new way to do a romantic comedy, which is a genre that’s very tough to find something fresh in.”
A Fish – Or in this Case a Shark – Out of Water: “That’s certainly the [effect] that gets the most interest. I think people…it’s more in the idea that a girl gets so angry that she flies out to the middle of the Atlantic, pulls out a deep sea creature and throws it through the window of somebody’s condo. For me, comedy and effects are most powerful when you see things that shouldn’t be there. It’s contextual. So to see a shark in the water means nothing. To see a shark in an apartment really does a lot. It’s on land, it’s in the big city, it’s not where it should be. It’s still vicious and it turns out to be a terrific scene. There were the other things are sort of more, to see a fire in a tall building, we’ve seen fires before. Yeah, it’s kind of cool, the fire looks real. And she puts it out in a kind of original way. That scene works for what the screenplay needs are, but in terms of a visual effect, it’s not as affective as the shark sequence.”
The Physical Demands of My Super Ex-Girlfriend: With Kill Bill and this film, Uma Thurman proves she can really handle herself in action sequences. Reitman says of Thurman, “She’s highly skilled and she is a force of nature. I couldn’t think of a more perfect person to play the lead in this movie. I think that her film baggage alone makes her very appropriate and just the wonderful way she looks. Most importantly, she has a goofy quality within her that she’s not demonstrated in movies very much.
She certainly was very willing to try anything and was not afraid and is very athletic, thank God. As is, by the way, Anna Faris. [She’s] very athletic, thank God. They were much better at it than Luke [Wilson] was.”
My Super Ex-Girlfriend presented Luke Wilson with his first opportunity to work in front of a green screen. “He said this is the first green screen stuff that he’s ever done. But I’ll tell you what Luke was: he was fearless. In other words, we threw him back into stuff. Like when she uses her super breath on him, she throws him into a table and up against this bookcase and that was really him. It was a real stunt. It was tough. He could have gotten pretty banged up. He got banged up a little bit and he did it a bunch of times without any problems. I mean , he played football so he knows how to throw his body around.”
Designing Uma Thurman’s Superhero Costumes: “There is not one costume, there are many costumes. Again, if you go back to the premise that this is a real girl in New York, my guess is she wouldn’t have some goofy latex thing on. She would have a major closet-full of stuff, which she does. She wears about a dozen different outfits in the picture and has many more.”
Working with Superhero Clichés: “As one in a myriad of comic book geeks growing up, I certainly wondered about certain things. So real simple clichés like, ‘Okay, so the super costume is underneath your regular clothes. So if you’re actually going to have sex with someone and they were taking your clothes off, what would happen?’ It started from there as a series of things. I tried to derive comedy from that.”
Reitman says the Archie comics were his personal favorites. “I liked Archie. I like the Archie comics. I did like the DC comics and I liked the horror comics, the EC stuff. The early EC stuff, the really horrific stuff because I was a big horror movie - not horror movie but horror movie and horror fan. I think it shifted. I got more into Mad magazine as I got older.”
