It's fitting that an hour-long conversation with Betty Thomas would be interrupted time and again by laughter. After all, she has long since transformed herself from an acclaimed, Emmy-winning actress (Sgt. Lucy Bates on Hill Street Blues) to a successful feature director known for a steady stream of well-crafted comedies — The Brady Bunch Movie (1995), Private Parts (1996), The Late Shift (1997, HBO), Dr. Dolittle (1998) and 28 Days (2000).
Taking a rare break from final post-production of her new Columbia Pictures release, I-Spy, Thomas sat in her office to reflect on her approach to directing and the unique challenges of film comedy.
Her love for directing comedy is rooted in her formative acting experiences. She was part of Chicago's acclaimed Second City Comedy Troupe in 1970. Her very first directing job, in fact, came after her run of Hill Street Blues when she returned to Chicago to direct a Second City stage show starring Mike Myers and Bonnie Hunt.
"Sometimes there's a bolt of lightning, and you have to be ready," she said. "About halfway through Hill Street, I thought, this can't be all there is. You can't just be doing a role like this for the rest of your life. It could get stultifying! As much as I loved that show, and as lucky as I was to be on it, I knew that afterward, as a girl, it was going to be limited — I would be playing the older next-door neighbor."
Thomas then asked Hill Street Blues creator Steven Bochco to let her be a director's observer on some of his other shows, and eventually she parlayed that experience into a directing job on Bochco's Hooperman.
"I came in the weekend before we shot. I paid the stand-ins $25 each to show up on a Saturday — bless their hearts! — and I ran through the entire first day's work with them. I had my viewfinder, I set lens sizes, I put marks on the floor. Then on Monday morning, when everybody else came in, I said, 'Put a 50 on it, you two actors come this way, when she goes that way, rack focus to her.' You could just see the set relax. They could see I kind of knew a little bit of what I was doing. You cannot be too prepared. The more comfortable you are, the freer you can be."
A relaxed, happy set is still important to Thomas, but if things get tense, she admits, "I like to yell! ... However, people have caught on through the years that when I yell, it's not a personal thing. And sometimes I laugh at the end of it, which really ruins it!"
The conversation shifted to the challenges of Thomas's new film. "With I-Spy, it was difficult to set the comic tone," she said. "It's really a comedy action film, not an action comedy film. It was not [originally] written as a comedy. I brought on some comedy writers to help me find what could really be funny, especially for the beginning and ending. Does the beginning set it up? Does the ending pay off something that we've [established] in a comic way throughout the movie?
"I made a couple of changes with the opening to let people laugh, to let them know that we were going to do a spy movie, but we were going to make it funny. I took out a lot that was just action, which some people thought was not the right thing to do — I like to establish a comic tone as soon as I can. There's action and violence in this movie, so I'd like the audience to know that it also has a comic slant."
Establishing early on what an audience can comfortably laugh at, said Thomas, is especially important for movies that blur the line between comedy and other genres or tones. Her acclaimed HBO film, The Late Shift, for instance, for which she won a DGA Award, blends comedy with a docudrama-like immediacy in its story of the Jay Leno/David Letterman late-night talk-show battle. The Howard Stern story, Private Parts, contains as much sweetness as it does humor. And 28 Days, the tale of an alcoholic in a rehab center, was her most challenging blend of comedy and drama to date.
Like I-Spy, those projects were not originally conceived as comedies. When producer Ivan Reitman first came to Thomas with the script for The Late Shift, Thomas was puzzled "because it wasn't really a funny script. Ivan said, 'Yeah, I know, that's why you should do it — because you're going to find those little moments that are going to make it funny and still tell the story.'
"Surprisingly, I had a total vision of how I was going to do it after the fifth page, which I almost never have. My vision changes in most movies 50 or 60 times before the final print master," she said. But with The Late Shift, "it was so clear to me. I knew that world. It just felt like I lived on the inside of that story. So I never let the camera rest. I didn't put it on anything solid — ever. The whole movie had to breathe like we were inside this world.
"I-Spy," Thomas continued, "was thoroughly scary in the sense that I didn't have a strong head about what this film was going to look like at first." Ultimately, her vision came together when she cast Owen Wilson opposite Eddie Murphy and saw sparks fly.
"I hired Owen because I thought he was the perfect counterpoint to Eddie, and I'm so glad I did. They are really the essence of the movie. There is nothing else in the movie quite as exciting as the two of them together on screen. You introduce them separately, and as soon as they crash together, the movie has a rightness, a certain aliveness, a sort of hyper-reality, bigger than our own pitiful problems, which I guess is the big reason why we like to watch movies."
Given her own acting background, it's not surprising that Thomas affords a great deal of trust and respect to her actors. "The choices they make are places you should be exploring," she said, "because they know it, they feel it, they're in it — unless you have a really bad actor. Sometimes I talk to actors loudly from behind the camera during a scene. Probably not a great idea. Why waste a whole take if it's not going well and a 'cut' means the whole thing breaks down for what seems like hours. Still and always, the focus of the [shooting] day is the actors."
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One of Thomas's biggest challenges in directing comedic actors is meshing different comic styles into a seamless whole. "Look at Owen's and Eddie's approaches," she said. "They're totally different. Owen is grounded in detailed character behavior; he's very word-oriented. Eddie is the opposite. He's bombastic; he bounces improvised dialogue up against the 'scenic wall.' He also has a unique reference level that's so high. People don't usually acknowledge it, but he knows every comic character in every movie ever done."
Further complicating matters was that each actor tended to be stronger on different takes. "Eddie is usually at his best the first or second take," said Thomas, "while Owen's best on the eighth or ninth. That's a problem." To solve it, Thomas would try to shoot "Eddie's side first. And with a two-shot, I tried to use it for mostly Eddie's stuff the first few takes and then to come back to it editorially later for Owen's best stuff. It convolutes the order of shooting sometimes, but you do have to figure out when your actors are best."
Once a film is cast, Thomas continues to work very closely with her writers, tailoring the script to the specific brand of comedy that the actors bring to the set. "I love the writers I work with," she said. "Aside from The Late Shift and Private Parts, my films have developed after my connecting with them, affected largely by which actors I cast."
While comedy — especially verbal comedy — may lend itself well to improvisation (which Thomas welcomes), "there's rarely a moment that comes out of something that's not on the page. Rarely. Once in awhile with Eddie it does, but you could never have imagined it. Mostly good improv comes from what is written, and an extrapolation on top of that, a sort of delving further into script ideas. I think the funniest moments in I-Spy are based on scripted pieces that my actors didn't even want to do. I couldn't believe it wasn't going to be funny, so I said, 'guys, you have to try this — this is an excellent comic situation, a comic setup, a comic conflict...' They did it better than I could have imagined, of course. If you're counting on improvised lines to make a film funny, it's probably not going to happen."
For sequences with visual effects, Thomas uses storyboards. "I try to work with storyboarders who have a sense of humor. There aren't many, by the way, because their gig is usually action films. And sometimes I do my own storyboards because they bring big laughs on the set!"
Generally, Thomas likes to shoot "as quickly as possible," often forgoing rehearsal. "Comedy can be crushed by rehearsals," she said, adding that over the years she has found that rehearsal tends to help her more than it helps the actors. Furthermore, a quick pace is crucial for maintaining the proper tone and freshness: "On a comedy, if I spend three hours on every setup, I'm dead."
This kind of pace, of course, requires a rock-solid camera department. "I like camera to be well rehearsed for that first take," said Thomas, "and yet something might happen that they don't know, so I like camera operators that are facile, who can think on their feet. That's what directing is too — a thinking-on-your-feet kind of job." A great job for the multi-tasking female brain.
It's also an invaluable quality for an assistant director (AD). Thomas described Richard Graves, who has worked on all her features, as "the greatest AD in the history of the world!" For Thomas, a good AD "has a sense of humor because he'll sense what's funny and what's not, and his tone on the set will be one of [flexibility], since I like to change things every three minutes." She also likes an AD "to have a technical side that I don't have — a knowledge of science and physics, for example. My empty spots need to be filled with his spots. And of course, he needs to be extremely organized in terms of scheduling."
In movies where timing is the key to success, Thomas feels that strong editing that sharpens the comic timing helps even the most talented actors. Her collaboration with editor Peter Teschner went so well on her first feature, Only You (1992), that she has worked with him on almost every project since, including I-Spy. "He responds viscerally, which in the editing room is what I need. And he giggles! He can laugh at the same thing over and over again. I love that. I need to be reminded that even though I've looked at it 8,000 times, it's fresh and it's funny."
Asked if she has any overarching philosophy that governs her directing, Thomas laughed, thought a moment, and then offered two: "I have no filters on my ideas. And I never, never, never give up."
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