Last month, we lost one of Hollywood’s mightiest moviemakers – Ivan Reitman, the filmmaker behind Ghostbusters, Meatballs, Dave, Twins, and plenty more classic comedies. His passing was met with an outpouring of love from fans and people in the industry alike – people who had been touched by his films, his outlook, and his talent. The new issue of Empire pays tribute to Reitman with a series of remembrances from the generation of comedic filmmakers he inspired – including one from Phil Lord and Christopher Miller. The pair recalled the time Reitman spent an entire week helping them rework Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse, and the advice he offered them that helped the movie reach its full potential. Read their tribute in full below.
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The list of bold-name filmmakers that captured our interest as we came of age in Hollywood is more or less unending. But the list of filmmakers who ever took a serious interest in us is pretty short. And the most surprising of them all was Ivan Reitman.
“Half of this movie is the best movie I have ever seen.”
“What about the other half?”
“The other half is terrible.”
We laughed super-hard. He wasn’t laughing. We had just screened Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse for one of our movie heroes, Ivan Reitman. And he was about to spend a week helping us make our movie better, for no reason other than he thought it could be.
We had met Ivan years before. He had taken a shine to a couple of our movies and wanted to meet (at [Beverly Hills deli] Nate ’n Al’s, natch). This is the only time in our career that this has ever really happened. An older filmmaker we looked up to reaching out and offering wisdom. We lapped it up like a giant plate of matzo brei.
Ivan wasn’t just interested in whether a movie was funny. He was interested in whether it was _good_.
What Ivan didn’t know is that the first director we ever saw behind the camera was Ivan. In a ‘making of’ piece that used to run on HBO about Ghostbusters. And what we remembered more than anything was his laugh. Warm, generous, and infectious. What could be better than being on the receiving end of that laugh? And what’s more, the way the piece was edited, he seemed like he thought everything was funny.
This is not true.
That part had to be earned. Because Ivan wasn’t just interested in whether a movie was funny. He was interested in whether it was good. He centred character and emotion in his films even when the premises were ridiculous. He saw the potential for the same in Spider-Verse. He came to the edit. He sat for hours having coffee and discussing copious notes he took down. He had no reason to do this. He seemed to have been equally hard on his own movies. He told us how he had to cut out the first 30 minutes of Twins because “it put everyone to sleep!” And what we learned from him is that loving a movie meant relentlessly challenging it to be its best self.
We did the notes. And lots of other people’s too. And lo, the movie got better.
We showed the next cut to some friends, and Ivan came. Halfway through, we looked over to see what Ivan was doing, but we didn’t have to. ‘Cause we could hear it. We elbowed each other.
Ivan Reitman was laughing.
What could be better?
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Read more tributes to Ivan Reitman – from Kumail Nanjiani, Paul Feig, and Todd Phillips – in the Doctor Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness issue of Empire, on sale Thursday 17 March and available to pre-order online here.