Paul Feig has a tendency to make films that are difficult to talk about until you have seen them. The trailers for Spy, The Heat and A Simple Favour, for example, paint pictures quite different from the finished movies. Often, you leave the cinema feeling as if you have been pleasantly fooled.
It’s certainly true with Last Christmas, which the director is sitting down to talk about in early September, and which appears, based on its teaser, to be a mushy festive romcom. Naturally, it doesn’t quite go where you would expect it to, which of course means we can’t really talk about the film we are here to talk about. “Exactly,” he says, smiling. He is wearing, as is his custom, an impossibly dapper three-piece suit, and he has a sweetly nervous cough/chuckle that ripples up as he speaks. “A lot of the movies I do just happen to have something like that in it. But I like people being surprised.”
Last Christmas, very loosely inspired by the music of George Michael and Wham!, stars Emilia Clarke as a woman recovering from a life-threatening illness and whose day-to-day existence is a boozy, reckless mess. It turns out that Daenerys Targaryen is an excellent comic actor. “Isn’t it crazy?” Feig says. A huge Game of Thrones fan, he summoned her for a meeting. “I was expecting her to be very Daenerys, you know, proper: ‘How do you do?’ She comes in, and she’s just funny, goofy and effervescent. I equate her in this movie to when Meg Ryan was in When Harry Met Sally. The whole country just goes: we’re in love with you.”
The film is also Feig’s love letter to London, where he has been living for the past year, even if it takes some geographical liberties: “They walk from the Embankment to Ally Pally [Alexandra Palace, which is several miles away]. Then they run out of Ally Pally on to the Strand! I have great guilt about that.” He loves London so much that he and his wife are making plans to move here. He got involved with the film when he went for a walk with Emma Thompson on Hampstead Heath to talk about directing Mindy Kaling’s Late Night, in which Thompson starred, but the timings didn’t work out. However, a friendship was born. “I was in the process of signing on to do a different film somewhere else, and into my inbox popped up this email from Emma, titled The Script What I Wrote, in good old Morecambe-and-Wise tradition.” He always gets nervous when friends send him scripts. “The best people in the world will send me a script sometimes and you’re just like: ‘I don’t know.’ But I read this and was completely out of my mind, and so impressed by it.”
This is his second Christmas movie. The first, Unaccompanied Minors, came out in 2006, but was a flop. What did he learn from it? “Apparently nothing,” he laughs, “because I did another Christmas film.” The script, by Thompson and Bryony Kimmings, and the prospect of being in London in December tempted him back. “Like it or not, London, you do Christmas amazingly well.” Also, its seasonal setting means it is guaranteed to come out for Christmas, and the release won’t get bumped. “I’m just desperate for people to see my movies,” he says. Is he really worried they won’t? “We’ll see,” he shrugs. “Every new movie is a chance to fail.”
Feig’s film career came off the back of a hugely successful one in television. He created the cult teen series Freaks and Geeks, produced by Judd Apatow, and he seems to have directed at least a few episodes of the greatest shows from the past two decades: Mad Men, 30 Rock, The Office, Parks and Recreation. But film was a slow starter. “I had done two unsuccessful movies, one being the first Christmas movie. That really stuck me in movie jail. It lost money for the studio.” Just before that one came out, he had been invited to the table read of a script that would become Bridesmaids. “I remember going: ‘Oh my God, this is what I want to do – a movie filled with all these funny women.’ Then it fell away for three years. I would call Judd occasionally, and be like: ‘Is that movie around?’ And he’d say: ‘I don’t think it’s gonna go.’”
Feig found himself in a funk, which became apparent when he was directing an internet campaign for a department store. “It was a fun job, but one of the people I was directing was Donald Trump.” He laughs, awkwardly. “It was so unnerving, and he was unnerving. He was actually a fan of The Office, so he was like: ‘Hey, that’s the guy who did The Office.’ But he had such a weird energy about him. I remember being back at my hotel room and thinking: ‘I’m so far away from doing what I want to do.’” Then the phone rang. “I got a call from my agent going, hey, I think the wedding movie is gonna go.”
Bridesmaids transformed his career. “But making it was terrifying. I always called it strike three, because if this one bombs, I’m dead.” He says there was additional pressure on it as a funny film written by and about women. “It shows how crazy and terrible the town can be, because really, they’re like, before we do other movies with women, let’s see how this one does. Would they ever say that when they’re making The Hangover? Like, all right, if this men-driven movie works, we can make more of these?”
Feig has always related to women, and since Bridesmaids, all his films have had female leads. They’re usually about women as outsiders; not quite managing to fit in where they are supposed to. “I was an only child. I grew up next to a family of eight kids, six of whom were girls. I liked the humour of joking around with my female friends because male humour devolves, eventually, into homophobia, punching and name-calling. I’d rather just have goofy fun.” Later, when he was acting and directing, he was frustrated with what he was seeing on screen. “I had [female] friends who were actors and comedians, and they would show up in movies and I’d be, like: ‘Oh yay, they’re going to be funny. And, what, they’re not funny?’ I love School of Rock, but I remember thinking: ‘Sarah Silverman is one of the funniest people on the planet. Why is she just being this mean girlfriend who’s not funny?’”
After Bridesmaids, he was sent scripts in a similar vein, but he has hopped around genres with joyful promiscuity: thriller, action, spy heist, buddy-cop movie. On the day we meet, it is announced that he will direct a classic monster movie called Dark Army, but there are more still that he wants to try. “Well, a musical, first and foremost. I want to do a big sci-fi epic. But not a pre-existing franchise.”
In 2016, Feig found himself at the centre of an internet storm, when his all-female Ghostbusters reboot unwittingly poked the hornet’s nest of online misogynistic trolls. Is that why he wouldn’t go for anything that already exists? “A little bit, yeah,” he says, his nervous cough/laugh returning. “What is weird is when you come into something that brings a set of rules that are unbreakable because, as a storyteller, you’re, like, why can’t I break that? Can’t I have fun with that?” That’s why he did the reboot. “For better or worse. I mean, we’ll find out when Jason’s movie [Reitman, who is making a Ghostbusters sequel] comes out. If that goes through the roof, I’ll go: ‘Sure, I guess I made a mistake doing a reboot.’ But I will never apologise for it because I’m very proud of the movie.”
He is writing Dark Army at the moment. “I’m sure there are going to be websites that get completely up in arms about it, but I’m at a point now where I don’t care. I used to care, and Ghostbusters was a really cathartic, terrible thing to go through, but it was cathartic.” He used to think everybody on the internet had to like him. Now, he cares a lot less. “You go: ‘It’s just the internet.’ I love all the amazing people I’ve connected with over the years on the internet, but then the ones that hate you, you’re like: ‘I can’t do anything about you.’”
Feig is not one for sequels. There is, as yet, no Bridesmaids II, no The Heat II, no Spy II. In an age of TV classics being rebooted, I ask if he would ever consider bringing the much-loved Freaks and Geeks back. “I get asked all the time to do it. I’m very scared of sequels or continuations of things because they’re very easy to screw up. James Brown is my inspiration: he says hit it and quit it.”
That said, he would like to make another Spy. Then he surprises me. “And I would actually make another Ghostbusters, if anybody ever wanted it, because I loved that world. I was like a kid in a candy store.” I tell him I would love to see it. “Well, some day,” he laughs. “Probably not. But thank you.”
Last Christmas is released on 15 November
