“We all took pay cuts to keep it R-rated, which with me meant I gave up 80% of my salary, but it was worth it,” he says, explaining that, thanks to some tax rebates, the movie cost roughly $37 million to make. He certainly wasn’t worried about his actors having good chemistry, always a key ingredient with a buddy picture. “Tracy just oozes chemistry,” he says with a hearty laugh. “He could have chemistry with a ceramic ashtray. Bruce loved him. He kept calling him kid, even though Tracy’s over 40, so there’s not really that big an age difference. But I think calling him kid meant Bruce liked him.”
Smith insists that he didn’t have any problems communicating with Willis, at least once he realized that Willis wasn’t going to do anything that he felt was out of his comfort zone. Smith illustrates the issue with an unbelievably raunchy metaphor involving a detailed description of oral sex, then teasingly said, “Try and get that into your old-media story.” I asked him if he could offer a PG-13 version of the story.
“Put it this way,” he said. “On the first day of shooting, I started to mess with Bruce, trying to get him to do something crazy, and he took out his gun and went bang — and shot me in the head. His point was pretty obvious. He’s done this part so many times that he knows what works and what doesn’t. He’s the caretaker of the Bruce Willis persona. He’s been a star for 25 years while most of his peers have fallen by the wayside, so he knows what works for his image. Basically, we all tried to make him laugh, figuring if we got Bruce just to smile once we’ve have something to tell our kids about.”
Q: So does that mean we can expect you to do another movie with them?
KS: It was easy this time. I don’t know what it would be like if I went in with something I wrote, or let’s say something I didn’t write but wanted to write. They were talking about “Hit Somebody,” the hockey movie I wanted to make based on the Warren Zevon song. And I said, “I know you like me right now. But I sweat blood for this. If you say you’re committing to it then you’re saying you’re greenlighting this movie.” So we said we’ll talk.
Q: What’s “Hit Somebody” actually about?
KS: It’s not a movie about the NHL. It’s a movie about the game, and it’s a movie about Canada. I look at it and keep describing as what I’m going for as the “Forrest Gump” of hockey movies. Not flat-out funny stuff I’ve always done. It’s a more serious comedy.
Q: If you get that one going, does that preclude you from coming on to direct another studio comedy that already has a script written?
KS: There are about five scripts that Warner Bros. has handed me that they’re interested in. One of them is with Tracy [Morgan]. The romantic in me wants to paint it as a “Platoon”-like battle for one soul, a battle between Tom Berenger and Willem Dafoe. But it’ll come down to what happens next. If best-case scenario, I’m shooting “Hit Somebody” by the end of the year, then what am I going to do between now and then? Maybe nothing. Or I can multi-task and spin another plate while waiting for it to come together. And there’s also “Red State” [a dark political drama he’s written]. There’s some very interested money that wasn’t interested a week ago, before “Cop Out” came out.
