Interview: Aiming for That "Bust Gut"

15 Minutes recently interviewed Jerry Zucker, writer/director of Airplane: The Movie, The Naked Gun, and Ghost. Brain Donors is his latest foray into the zany world of cinema slapstick.

15 Minutes: Would you explain your creative process?

Jerry Zucker: It's a long process, but, basically, we sit in a room--my brother David [Zucker] and I, or Jim [Abraham] and David and I--and we just start thinking of ideas. We have a general idea of what we want.

Really, you just start to talk, and then eventually you fit the pieces together. It's kind of like putting together a puzzle, but first you have to make the pieces.

First we talk about all the things that could happen; a lot of times we watch old movies and just really brainstorm and laugh and write down jokes and ideas for scenes and characters. Then, at some point we have to say, "What direction is our movie shaping in?"

15 Minutes: How much of a final film--that appears in the theater--is spontaneous material?

Zucker: Very little. Maybe 5 percent or something like that. We really spend a lot of time working on the script.

The jokes that tend to have paths that work best are jokes that we've thought about for a long time and have stood the test of every draft, looking at it and saying: "Yes, it's still funny; it's still funny!" Something you just come up with one day on the set--you might decide the next take that it's not so great. Obviously, things do come up, and we do add things, but really we pretty much stick to the script.

15 Minutes: What is the target audience for a film like Naked Gun?

Zucker: We don't really think in terms of target audiences. We write movies basically for ourselves. The target audience is us. The gamble is that there are enough people that laugh at what we laugh at or cry at what we cry at or whatever--that the movies will work.

We never say, "What do the movie audiences between this age and that age...?" When you start doing that, you're going to miss, because then you're going, "Well, I don't think this is funny, but kids will." I don't think you can make a successful movie that way.

15 Minutes: Is your life anything at all like what it might seem from viewing one of your films?

Zucker: The first thing people think when they see our movies is that we're stoned all the time, or at least that we are when we write them, which is not true. None of us does any drugs or really ever drinks particularly.

Our non-business lives are fairly normal. We just grew up with a sense of humor and a real joy in putting that humor on film and making people laugh--getting people to see the humor that we see in something. We really have a good time when we write these movies.

15 Minutes: I wonder whether you worry about your parody being construed as something offensive. Today, people and groups are often quite sensitive to many things.

Zucker: Obviously, we feel a sense of responsibility in movie-making, because you put something out there for the public. I don't want to be telling a Polish joke, for instance, on screen, because that does harm to people. I don't want to do anything that's going to really do any injury to any group.

On the other hand, we don't run scared from political groups. We have a certain level of making fun of everybody. We make fun of ourselves, and we make fun of all groups.

15 Minutes: What can you advise college or university students who want to enter the film industry?

Zucker: Come to Hollywood, and don't call me! No. Here would be my best advice: If you want to make films, the first thing--if you want to be a writer, director or producer, if you want to develop movies--you should decide what it is you have to say, and you should practice telling a story on film. What I always tell people is, "Don't just go banging on doors and looking for a job. Get up a camera; equipment is so accessible nowadays. Just write a story and tell it on film. Then show it to people, and see how they react."

Get some friends to act in it, and see if it works and scares anybody.