Jason Reitman on making ‘Saturday Night’ at a breakneck pace, sticking with smaller features

Willem Dafoe spent his first day on Jason Reitman’s Saturday Night sitting up in the live audience set and watching the production unfold in front of him. “At the end of the day, he came up to me and said, ‘You know what I love about your movie?’” Reitman recalls. “‘No edge of frame. I don’t know what the fuck you’re shooting.’”

That is a good way to sum up the director’s 10th feature film — a dizzy­ing romp chronicling 90 minutes leading up to the first episode of iconic US sketch show Saturday Night Live (SNL) in 1975. Inspired by the tight turnarounds on which SNL is built, Reitman wrote the script with co-writer Gil Kenan in three days, shot the film in six weeks and had it edited within three months, in time to premiere at Telluride in September.

“I’ve had that experience of hacking away at a cold log with a dull axe,” says Reitman, referring to the seven years it took him to write his debut feature Thank You For Smoking. “This was the opposite. It was like lightning in a bottle.”

The seed for Saturday Night was first planted back in 2008 when the director, fresh from the Oscar-nominated success of Juno, was a guest writer on the show. “It reminded me of those film festivals where you’re given two days to make whatever you can,” says Reitman, speaking to Screen International during the BFI London Film Festival, where Saturday Night was the surprise film. “I’ve always loved the time constraint of it. I loved that urgency.”

Unlike the real SNL, however, Reitman had months to prepare before he and Kenan, fresh from their Ghostbusters: Afterlife collaboration, sat down to write the script. Over the 2020 lockdowns, the duo conducted Zoom interviews with as many of the cast and crew from the inaugural October 11, 1975 show as possible.

“We did our own journalism, as though we were writing a book,” explains Reitman. They then began “murder boarding” the film, akin to the detective-thriller trope where cork boards are covered with photographs and red string.

Though the camera primarily follows the show’s creator Lorne Michaels — played by The Fabelmans breakout Gabriel LaBelle — “there are 80 speaking roles in this film and we wanted to track all those people,” says the director. “You’re also tracking background actors, you’re tracking props, and we have to weave all of those on a very specific route.”

With Reitman in Los Angeles and Kenan in London, the duo then began to “tag team” the script across the time zones, giving them a 24-hour writing schedule. “It’s because of how well-plotted out it was in advance,” says the filmmaker. “The script is pretty similar to the movie that was made.”

The great imitator

While SNL broadcaster NBC is part of Comcast, which owns Universal, the director reunited with Sony’s Columbia Pictures for the project — he and Kenan signed a producing deal with the studio in 2021, after the success of Afterlife. “We had to license the SNL theme song because that’s a copyrightable piece of material,” explains Reitman, regarding the corporate permissions needed to tell this story. “But we were depicting a moment in history as opposed to showing anything from the show.”

Of the film’s various inspirations — Sebastian Schipper’s one-shot Berlin-set drama Victoria among them — 2023’s The Zone Of Interest might be the most surprising. “That film broke new ground as far as the ability to evoke emotion through the smallest sounds,” enthuses Reitman. As a result, there was a live sound mixer on set tuning into a cacophony of conversations, production noises and music at any given time.

With the help of blueprints from the show’s original production designer Eugene Lee (who died in 2023), the director worked with his own production designer Jess Gonchor to recreate the eighth and ninth floor of New York’s 30 Rocke­feller Plaza at a studio in Atlanta. “We wanted to create a set that was infinitely shootable in any direction,” explains Reitman. “Everything was built in so the camera can move anywhere it wants and look in any direction, and there’s no bogeys.”

As a result, scenes had to be blocked and rehearsed to ensure everyone was in the right place at the right time. “Every day I would start at home base with all the actors and crew and a giant whiteboard,” recalls Reitman. “I would draw out what everyone was going to do that day, and then they would try it and it would be a mess.

“There’s a good hour where you’re just shooting and you’re getting nothing. Every time, I would question my entire philosophy on this film, and then it just would start to click.”

The director says he owes this to his cast — an ensemble comprising mostly newer faces such as LaBelle but also Cory Michael Smith, Rachel Sennott, Cooper Hoffman and Dylan O’Brien. For a show so renowned for its impressions, Reitman had no interest in casting great impersonators.

“We were looking for people who could capture the essence of the drama,” he says. “It’s John Belushi’s inner fear of success. It’s Chevy Chase’s ego that needed to be humbled. It’s Gilda Radner’s overwhelming empathy.”

In another attempt to emulate the SNL philosophy, Succession star Nicholas Braun takes on two roles: notorious anti-comedian Andy Kaufman and puppeteer Jim Henson. While Henson had always been written for Braun, it was not until Benny Safdie, originally set to play Kaufman, had his own feature (The Smashing Machine) greenlit and had to exit the project, that the team decided to get creative. “We just couldn’t stop thinking that [Braun] would be so great as Kaufman as well,” says Reitman.

Home comforts

Sony released Saturday Night last October in North America, grossing just shy of $10m, also beginning the international rollout, with the UK set for January 31. The film signalled a relieved Reitman’s return to the mid-budget feature territory on which he built his career, after directing the $75m-budget Ghostbusters: Afterlife in 2019. “I think I really made that movie for my dad,” he says, referencing his late father Ivan Reitman, who directed the first two Ghostbusters titles and produced Afterlife.

While Reitman went on to produce Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire and is set to produce a further untitled Ghostbusters feature, he looks unlikely to helm another tentpole anytime soon. “I understand why some people love making giant movies but it’s not really to my taste,” he admits. “It’s an added level of stress I don’t need. This-size movie is exactly where I’d love to live. I like the freedom to be a little more experimental.”

As for future projects, the director is hoping to do another film set in one location like Saturday Night and plans to keep collaborating with Kenan. “I think it’s the longest monogamous relationship of my life,” he jokes.

For now, Reitman is looking forward to catching his breath following a whirlwind year. “Then I’ll start all over again, just like they do every Tuesday on Saturday Night Live.”