Director Paul Feig at the CinemaCon Spy party in Las Vegas on April 21, 2015.
Alberto E. Rodriguez / Getty Images
There was a moment in the spring of 2011 when director Paul Feig realized his entire career rested on a single screening in a packed and unruly Austin theater. He was about to debut his first feature directorial effort in five years, after his last movie, the 2006 kids comedy Unaccompanied Minors, had been such a disastrous bomb that it had delivered what Feig believed to be an irreparable blow to his professional life.
"I was firmly in movie jail," he told BuzzFeed News earlier this spring, not far from that fateful theater. "I'd really hit a point where I was like, well, that's it, my movie career's over."
But then producer Judd Apatow, Feig's friend and collaborator on the beloved 1999–2000 cult TV series Freaks and Geeks, called with a rare second chance, a female-driven comedy that he wanted Feig to direct. That film was Bridesmaids, and what had Feig so anxious was its semisecret midnight screening at the 2011 SXSW Film Festival, the first time the movie had been shown in public.
"Everything rode on it," Feig recalled. "Because if I had another movie bomb, then I would be not only in movie jail, I'd be in movie dungeon."
Feig and Kristin Wiig on the set of Bridesmaids.
Suzanne Hanover / Universal / Courtesy Everett Collection
The director had already watched Bridesmaids kill at several private rough-cut test screenings, so he knew the movie worked. What he didn't know was whether the rowdy crowd of mostly male film geeks packed into the 1,100-seat movie theater would appreciate his emotionally nuanced, character-driven wedding comedy starring Kristen Wiig, Maya Rudolph, Rose Byrne, and Melissa McCarthy, none of whom had headlined a studio feature before. "I remember getting in there and looking around, going, like, Oh, there's not very many women in here," Feig said with his typical deep, nervous chortle. "I had at least two martinis. I cannot face a screening with total sobriety."
Four years later, Feig was back in Austin, crouched in a hip bar constructed from giant steel containers, a martini in hand, anxiously awaiting the 2015 SXSW debut of another studio comedy he directed starring Melissa McCarthy. Just about everything else about his life, however, had transformed drastically.
At 52, Feig is not only out of movie jail, he is quite simply one of the most in-demand comedy directors working in Hollywood today. Bridesmaids, of course, became the sleeper hit of of the year, and his follow-up, the buddy cop comedy The Heat starring McCarthy and Sandra Bullock, was the highest-grossing comedy of 2013. On Friday, Feig's secret agent comedy Spy, which he also wrote, is poised to give him his third blockbuster comedy in a row. And in two weeks, Feig will start production on one of next summer's buzziest movies, the all-female reboot of Ghostbusters, starring McCarthy, Wiig, and current standout Saturday Night Live cast members Leslie Jones and Kate McKinnon.
It's about as dramatic a career turnaround as possible for a Hollywood filmmaker, but escaping his five-year stint in movie jail was far from the only time Feig's found himself standing at the precipice of a professional chasm. It's happened, in truth, with some frequency. Usually, he's found a way to navigate past it; a few times, however, he's tumbled down so far that he wasn't sure if he'd ever find his way back up. Facing the abyss of failure so often has not only informed Feig's approach to comedy and storytelling, it's why, with the success Spy all but certain, the only thing Feig is sure about is that his hot streak could end tomorrow.
Jude Law, Feig, and McCarthy on the set of Spy.
Larry Horricks / 20th Century Fox / Alice Mongkongllite for BuzzFeed
Like many filmmakers of his generation, Feig spent his childhood making Super 8 movies with his neighborhood buddies in a suburb of Detroit. He counts Raiders of the Lost Ark and Woody Allen's Take the Money and Run as touchstones that sparked his determination to move to Los Angeles and start a career as a filmmaker. But when he got into USC's film school, he enrolled as an actor, not a director. "My justification was, If I know how movies are made, I'll be a better actor," he said, wincing a bit at his own youthful pretentiousness. "But I was a chicken. I was the last kid to walk. I was the last kid to learn how to ride a bike. I've just always been like a late bloomer."
Even when Feig landed a rare opportunity to direct one of the two movies during the school year — after his friend who was going to do it dropped out — he found the sudden rush of responsibility to be utterly paralyzing. "I would have these nightmares about, like, I'm going to be on set, and everybody's going to be looking at me," he remembered. "And then I'll have to yell at someone or have to fire somebody or be mean to somebody. That was my concept of being in charge. You have to be tough and yelling and screaming. I just crumbled."
Instead, Feig applied his creative energy to dreaming up an ingenious way of backing out of the job. "I rewrote the script and made it, like, pro-suicide," he said with that same signature, self-deprecating laugh. "It was about these two girls who have a disease and are trying to get through it. And then I made it where they end up killing themselves at the end." His strategy worked. "I remember sitting with the head of the film school, and he's reading and going, 'You can't do something where you're basically saying, It's good to kill yourself!' I was like, 'Well, I guess I can't do the movie, then.'"
The cast of The Louie Show: Feig, Kate Hodge, Bryan Cranston, Laura Innes, Nancy Becker-Kennedy, and Louie Anderson.
CBS / Courtesy Everett Collection
Feig continued to focus on developing his acting career, and found some real success not too long after graduating: He had supporting roles on TV series that rarely made it past their first seasons, like the 1988 CBS adaptation of Dirty Dancing, the 1992 Tom Arnold vehicle The Jackie Thomas Show, and the 1996 Louie Anderson vehicle The Louie Show. He thought he finally landed a big break as a series regular on a genuine hit, Sabrina, the Teenage Witch, which launched in 1996. Feig played Sabrina's science teacher, Mr. Pool, and the job promised enough financial security that he decided to finally throw caution to the wind and direct, write, and star in his first feature film.
With a tiny self-financed budget of $35,000 that cleaned out his savings, Feig wisely kept the film, titled Life Sold Separately, simple. He wrote a story about four people who meet up in an empty field over the course of a single day, and then he storyboarded every shot to streamline the production, which only had six days to shoot. On the first day, things went more or less according to plan. The second day? "We just hit the rocks," Feig said. "We were halfway through the day, and we were way behind. I remember thinking, I'm going to have a nervous breakdown. I just want to quit right now — take my stuff and just walk away."
This time, however, walking away meant something far more existential. "I walked off on the other side of this field," Feig continued. "And I'm just standing there, trying not to hyperventilate. I remember thinking, This is it. If you pull out of this, you will never direct. You are opening up a world in which you can just stop doing something if it is tough." (It’s reminiscent of Annie, Wiig's character in Bridesmaids, who let the early failure of her bakery cripple her self-worth, leaving her life stranded in neutral.)
Feig collected his thoughts, came back to his crew, and scrapped his storyboards in favor of shooting the scene at hand in a single take. "Not the most cinematic thing in the world, but by doing it, we were right back on schedule," he said. "I had to get past the fear of being in charge."
Feig on the set of Unaccompanied Minors.
Warner Bros. / Courtesy Everett Collection / Alice Mongkongllite for BuzzFeed
On the heels of that personal triumph, however, Feig confronted a cascade of overlapping misfortunes and indignities that almost pushed him out of Hollywood for good. A massive technical snafu with Life Sold Separately’s negative meant Feig could only screen the movie on a grainy VHS tape; perhaps as a result, he couldn't get any film festivals to accept it. Meanwhile, he learned he'd been written out of Sabrina the Teenage Witch after the first season. And although he was flat broke, he had also started to sour on acting as a viable long-term career.
"I just realized, I don't think I can make any money doing this," he remembered. "I had very limited skills as an actor. I couldn't take having no control." Feig knew he was truly finished with acting soon after finishing Life Sold Separately, when he auditioned for the lead role in executive producer John Landis' TV adaptation of Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. "John Landis has always been one of my favorite comedy directors," he said. "I come in, and he goes, 'Oh, I see you just directed a movie!' And I had this, like, amazing 15 minutes with John Landis where we're talking about comedy directing … just, like, two guys in charge. And then [there was] that awkward moment where he goes, like, 'So, are you going to read for us?' My mind just snapped. I walked out of there going, I can't do this, I can't do this."
With no distribution in sight for Life Sold Separately, Feig went on an often lonely and unrewarding college tour with the film, unsure if, when it was over, he would ever work in the industry again. Acting had become untenable, and directing felt like a fruitless dead-end. But rather than give into his despair, Feig chose to channel his feelings of frustration, isolation, and defeat into what became one of the most indelible works of television of the last 30 years. "It was during that [tour] where I was like, Well, I've got to create something," he said. "Maybe I'll just go back to writing."
The result was the pilot script for Freaks and Geeks, which Feig sent to Judd Apatow, a friend from his early days as a stand-up comedian. Apatow had just landed a deal with DreamWorks Television off the strength of his writing on HBO's The Larry Sanders Show. And he loved Feig’s script. DreamWorks bought it, and overnight, Feig went from unemployed actor and frustrated director to the creator and executive producer of his first TV series.
Martin Starr, John Francis Daley, and Samm Levine in an episode of Freaks and Geeks.
NBC / Courtesy Everett Collection
Feig's time on Freaks and Geeks was grueling, formative, and, in many ways, idyllic. He poured himself into every aspect of the show — an hour-long dramedy about two sets of high school outcasts in a Detroit suburb in the early ’80s — and when he got a chance to direct an episode, he finally found the creative satisfaction that had been eluding him for so many years. "I'm really, really proud of that episode, because that, more than Life Sold Separately, was really my kind of coming-out as a director," he said. The episode also, unfortunately, served as Freaks and Geeks' series finale. Although the show won universal acclaim and a passionate cult audience, it was getting creamed in the ratings. NBC canceled it before Feig's episode had aired, burning it off instead during the summer.
Understandably, he was gutted, and while the show had been the best thing to ever happen to his career up to that point, it also didn't exactly make him a hot commodity. "A critically acclaimed comedy that doesn't do well with an audience means nothing, I hate to say, as much as I love having critical acclaim," Feig said with a smile. "I was going into this hopeless area of, like, fuck, nobody gets what I do. Not that I'm so smart. But it was just like, I'm not in sync, because my stuff was all really behavioral." Instead, Feig watched broad, high concept, weird-kid-in-high-school shows Malcolm in the Middle and That '70s Show become that era's big ratings hits. "You know, very funny, but the polar opposite of what I was trying to do with our show."
Feig instead tried his hand at the polar opposite of comedy: adapting Anne Holm's young adult novel I Am David, about a 12-year-old who escapes a Bulgarian labor camp after World War II, as his next feature directorial effort. One of the first films bankrolled by the independent family movie production company Walden Media, the movie earned, at best, mixed reviews, and barely made a blip at the box office.
It was Feig's next film, however, that locked him up in movie jail. Unaccompanied Minors, based on a This American Life story about children of divorce traveling alone during the holidays who are snowed in at the airport, was supposed to be Warner Bros.' big family Christmas movie for 2006. Although the creative process had been bumpy — including an initial screening of a director's cut for the studio that Feig called "disastrous" — the director said that his final cut screened incredibly well in its first test screening with a general audience. "The head of the studio came up to me and said, 'You've done your job. You delivered us a great movie. Now it's up to us to promote it. And if we can't make this a hit, then it's our failure,'" said Feig.
Unaccompanied Minors
John Bramley / Warner Bros.
The film was not a hit. It opened in seventh place, ultimately grossing just $16.7 million domestically. Feig knew full well what that meant for his standing in Hollywood. "The first time out of the gate, if you make a movie for the studio and it doesn't make them a profit, they have zero — zero — motivation to hire you again," he said. And yet, Feig also recalled fielding sympathy calls from studio execs. "Like, 'We're so sorry. We didn't promote this enough, blah blah blah,'" he said. "And you're like, Oh good, I'm off the hook!"
But then a noticeable chill began to descend on Feig's career. He had another film in development at Warner Bros., and had been fighting over a casting decision with its high-powered producer. Before Unaccompanied Minors opened, the studio's execs backed Feig. After, their full-throated support downshifted into feeble dithering. "'Well, we're not sure. We can't really go up against him,'" Feig remembered them saying. "I had a rewrite due, and I turned it in, and then it took a long time for somebody to respond to it. They don't even call up and say, 'We're not doing it.' It was like, 'We're going to wait to see what happens with this.'" What happened was absolutely nothing, until the film went away entirely.
Feig's dire circumstances really sunk in, however, when he was in contention to direct the first feature adaptation of Jeff Kinney's wildly popular Diary of a Wimpy Kid books. "I'd have these amazing meetings with all the studio people," Feig said. "It was my movie. At the last minute, my agent said, 'Well, the head of the studio won't approve you for it.' I was just like, If I can't get a kids movie, it's over. Fuck, I'm in movie jail."
Feig on the set of The Heat.
Gemma LaMana / 20th Century Fox / Courtesy Everett Collection / Alice Mongkongllite for BuzzFeed
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