SPOILER ALERT: This article contains spoilers from “The Naked Gun,” currently in theaters nationwide.
There is no funnier bit in this weekend’s “The Naked Gun” than one involving stars Liam Neeson and Pamela Anderson in a ménage à trois with a snowman.
Deranged and delightful, the sketch comes as a montage halfway through director and co-writer Akiva Schaffer’s reboot of the beloved spoof film (which earned an admirable $17 million at the domestic box office this weekend). The sequence is straight out of Schaffer’s old stomping ground, The Lonely Island, the comedy troupe born out of memorable digital shorts from “Saturday Night Live.”
For the first half of the new “Naked Gun,” Neeson’s hardened detective Frank Drebin, Jr. and Anderson’s femme fatale Beth Davenport have been at odds as they investigate a murder. But, in a case of art imitating life, they eventually succumb to their desires for one another. Fleeing Los Angeles for an idyllic cabin in the snow, a romantic montage kicks off with Neeson and Anderson frolicking to the Starship song “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now,” most memorably in the ’80s classic “Mannequin.”
The pair builds a comically large snowman and romp in a wintery landscape. They steal glances at one another from across dimly lit rooms and over the steamy water of a chalet hot tub. Things take a turn when they remove a book from a living room shelf titled, “Spells & Incantations.” A supernatural green light travels from the book to the snowman outside, bringing the giant creature to vivid life. We won’t give away the entire bit, but this snowman finds himself straight in the middle of a Hollywood throuple – one that quickly dissolves into jealousy and attempted murder on the snowman’s part.
Schaffer caught up with Variety to dish on the absurd scene, why it was the hardest sell of the script and how he managed to overcome Paramount’s doubts over what will now be an unforgettable part of this new entry to the canon.
You preserved so much of the “Naked Gun” legacy, but this snowman sequence feels straight out of The Lonely Island.
The idea of the killer snowman is certainly not a well-worn trope. I don’t believe there is one in “The Snowman” starring Michael Fassbender, but it does exist in my mind because of “Jack Frost.” I’ve never actually seen “Jack Frost,” but I’ve seen the trailer to “Jack Frost” and I am aware it exists. There are two versions. One with a really bad CG snowman, and one with a person in a costume that, if you Google it, looks strikingly like ours. That’s not an accident.
We were trying to be original. There’s a line that Liam Neeson says in the film, at the shrine of his father [Leslie Nielsen]: “I want to be just like you, but at the same time, completely different and original.” That was our goal. We got to a point in the script where we thought a love montage would be nice. The first “Naked Gun” did one that is iconic to us. We were stuck on how to do ours. One night, I woke up at four in the morning to use the bathroom and got back into bed and just saw the entire thing. I wrote it down in points and emailed it off to my co-writers. And that is what’s in the movie a year later.
Did anyone, at any point in the process, push back?
Certain friends would read the script as a favor, like Andy Samberg. He said, “Do not let them cut [the snowman], it’s the funniest thing in your movie.” And then other people would read it and go. “I got everything except for that snowman thing.” It was polarizing, but the response has been overwhelmingly positive.
Talk about the actual snowman.
Our snowman is a work of art. The Jim Henson team in New York made it for us, and it came out perfect. The studio kept holding $1 million in the line item budget for a CG snowman and then kept using that as the reason why the sequence had to be cut. I remember saying, “It’s not CG! It’s a puppet! We are going to build it, it will cost way less than that.”
How did Liam and Pamela react after they read this in the script?
Well, we had an intimacy coordinator. You must. This scene was right in the middle of the schedule, and they were getting along so well on and off set. We would all go to dinners together on the weekends, and they like each other to this day. I think, for the snowman, they were grateful to goof off for two days. There were no lines to memorize. It was like shooting a music video. We did run out of time, and did not get to the actual sex scene with [Liam, Pam and the snowman]. We picked it up on the very last day of shooting. It was the second-to-last thing we shot, and might have been the most fun we had.
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