In the world of spoof comedy, few titles loom as large as The Naked Gun. The cult classic film trilogy, based on the television series Police Squad!, helped define the genre with its irreverent humor and zany wordplay. Comedy filmmaking trio David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker (abbreviated as ZAZ) pioneered their unique brand of parody with barrels chock-full of visual and verbal gags fired with deadpan delivery. The original 1988 film starring ZAZ mainstay Leslie Nielsen became an icon of screen absurdity. 31 years, 4 months, and 14 days after the opening of 1994’s Naked Gun 33⅓: The Final Insult, the boys in blue are back in theaters for more inane antics.
In Paramount Pictures’ The Naked Gun, director Akiva Schaffer (of The Lonely Island fame) and producer Erica Huggins (president of Seth MacFarlane’s Fuzzy Door) revive the absurdist charm of the original franchise, literally honoring the spirit of the series while bringing a more millennial perspective to the adult-skewing satire. As the director behind Hot Rod and Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, Schaffer brings his sensibility and comedic expertise to balance the traditional over-the-top humor. Filling the trousers of Lt. Frank Drebin is Liam Neeson as son Lt. Frank Drebin Jr., who must rely on his very particular set of skills to save the day and prevent the closure of Police Squad. Embracing the playful homage to noir, Pamela Anderson matches Neeson at every turn as a femme fatale who’s much more than private eye candy.
As 90s nostalgia hits the zeitgeist, Paramount’s uproarious legacy sequel promises an unapologetically funny throwback to the kind of comedies that inspired Schaffer and Huggins to pursue laughter for a living. As the film arrives in theaters August 1st, director Akiva Schaffer and producer Erica Huggins bare all about the delicate balance of rebooting a comedy classic, taking Boxoffice Pro behind the line of The Naked Gun and into the joy of creating movies designed for laughs.
I came across an interview with Leslie Nielsen where he was talking about how Naked Gun was not directed in a way that told the audience what was funny, and that the actors didn’t ever behave as if they were doing something funny. That’s exactly what you captured here, and why it works so well. It’s played completely straight. How did you land on that tone?
Akiva Schaffer: Accepting the challenge of the movie, that is what is put forth, right? If you didn’t do that, then is it even a Naked Gun movie, or is it just a cop detective comedy? The things that made Naked Gun are dramatic actors playing it real, playing it like they don’t even know they’re in a comedy. Playing it like they’re too stupid to know they’re in a comedy. Not even that the character is dumb, but that the actor is too dumb.
There’s stuff in the Airplane! book that came out last year, [Surely You Can’t Be Serious: The True Story of Airplane!] an oral history by Zucker, Zucker, and Abrahams, where they’re talking about how it came to be. Sometimes people would even ask them, “Did Leslie Nielsen or the other serious actors that were only known for serious movies realize what they were saying? Did they know they were in a comedy?” Which, of course, they did, but it’s almost the overall umbrella joke of what those guys pioneered: that tone. The music is serious like it would be in the real version, and the sets look normal like they would be. The lighting is the same [as the] lighting from a serious movie. The directing is the same [as the] directing from a serious movie. All of that. Except for when you have to break it for a joke: everything can always be broken for a joke.
That’s why it isn’t starring Will Ferrell, and it is starring Liam Neeson, because it has to come from the last place you expect. If somebody walks in and you’re watching this and you put it on pause, unless it’s right in the middle of a gag, they should go, “Oh, what are you watching?” And assume it’s one of Liam’s many action movies where he’s a badass killer. That’s kind of the joy of it, and that’s the spirit I was trying to [capture], the legacy. That’s what makes a Naked Gun movie.
Liam is pitch-perfect casting. It’s a mode that we haven’t necessarily seen him in before on the big screen. But I was surprised to hear that he felt nervous coming to set every day.
Akiva Schaffer: He hid it pretty well. I know he says that, but he’s a pretty confident guy in general. I think part of that is just him being humble, but part of it is like what you found Leslie saying, right? You’re not acting funny, because that would ruin it. You’re not acting like you’re joking or telling a joke, because that would ruin it. He just had to act real, which I can imagine might feel a little bit vulnerable. I was so grateful that he put his trust in me, honestly.
He’s made 105 movies or something. He knows what he’s good at, and he knew why he was saying yes to doing this. Why it was a good idea for him to do it, why it made sense. But there’d be jokes where he’d be like, “Are you sure about that one?” Sometimes he’d come in and have the silliest pitch of all, and I’d be like, “Are you sure about that one?” So overall, what I kept saying was, “This movie is going to be 85 minutes long.” Naked Gun is 85 minutes long. Naked Gun 2 is 85 minutes long. They’re all under 90 [minutes.] Top Secret!, Airplane!, the best of the Mel Brooks movies, Borat, and Austin Powers. Movies that are just trying to make you laugh are never more than 90 [minutes].
Our script was like 115 pages, and so [we went in knowing that] we’re going to try alternate jokes, and we’re gonna try new jokes. [That I was] going to compress everything. I hope that gave him the confidence to try everything and not worry about it, knowing it didn’t all have to end up in the movie.
Liam and Pamela bring a kind of dignity to the words. She mentioned that there were sometimes 12 alternate takes on any given punchline. What was the process for figuring that out on set and then honing it down, compressing it, like you said.
Akiva Schaffer: When it’s a physical gag, you can’t—well, some of those even had alts too. For the most part, [it was] just having worked in comedy now for 20 years. This fall will be 20 years since I got SNL with Jorma [Taccone] and Andy [Samberg]—The Lonely Island co-collabs. You just know you’re wrong as often as you’re right about what’s going to work. Something can be really funny when you’re writing it, and then it doesn’t work on set. Or it can be really funny on set, and then it doesn’t work once it’s put together, and something that felt sort of funny on set once it’s in the context of the story can be the funniest. A little look that could never be scripted can sometimes land a joke. Whereas the words on the page that made you laugh over and over, when it’s said, it’s like, ‘Uh huh, and then what?’, and then the other character going ‘Hmm’ is actually where the joke lands. You never know. You need to get those reactions. The alts are insurance.
We made Popstar with Judd Apatow, and he’s famous for having the whole peanut gallery there of other writers just yelling out alts. Doing it as scripted two or three times, and then just trying scenes totally other ways. This can’t be quite that loose, because you can’t improv Naked Gun jokes. We had to prep ahead of time, but the alts came naturally. You’re writing the scene, you have a joke, but you’re like, ‘We can top that’. So we come up with another one. We go, ‘Can we come up with something better?’ By the end of the day, you have eight other versions of the joke, and you never know which one [will work the best] once it’s coming out of your actor’s mouth. It might be the funniest one when I’m in the writers room saying it out loud, pretending to be Liam, but then you have Liam say it, and all of a sudden it’s not the funniest one, and the one that wasn’t that funny, he adds a little sparkle to a little laugh, and all of a sudden it’s way funnier.
You want to leave room to discover stuff. We would have a process where on set every morning, for the scenes that we were doing that day, I would have a side script that would have all the other ideas for it. We would get it to them in their trailers, either the night before or that morning. They would have the day’s script that they knew they were doing and then the new one that was dumped on them at the last minute.
Do you have any strong core moviegoing memories, specifically around comedy?
Akiva Schaffer: In relation to ZAZ movies, it was Top Secret!, and it was my 10th birthday, I believe, and it was a slumber party at my house. My parents rented it for me, and I didn’t know what it was. It was like eight boys in sleeping bags on the floor of my living room. It was very formative to who I am as a person at this point, I can say. I laughed so hard and just couldn’t believe what I was seeing: these adults being serious. The thing we just went over of what makes their formula work. I just thought it was the funniest thing I’d ever seen, and I watched it so many times after trying to chase that feeling. I saw Naked Gun in the theaters because I knew it was those guys and had a similarly religious experience that time.
The other one I’ll say that is not related but kind of is because they’re going to try to do it again is Spaceballs. When Spaceballs came out, I was the right age. I had not even seen Star Wars. I knew everything about Star Wars, but I was too afraid to see it. I was that young. It looked too scary to me, but I knew everything about it and had read the novelization. I had done everything to be able to be part of the conversation, but I was too scared. I saw Spaceballs in the theater with my dad, and it’s the first memory I have of us both laughing together at the same stuff and also being so proud that I wasn’t scared. I left thinking it was the best thing I had ever seen.
In hindsight, it’s very good, but it’s no Blazing Saddles or Young Frankenstein. But at that time, at that age. Even when I saw Airplane!, I was a little too young for it, and I preferred Naked Gun and Top Secret! because they hit me at the right age. As an adult, Airplane! might be my favorite of all three. All the way up through Mel Brooks and then discovering Monty Python very late. Then even Billy Madison and Austin Powers. They were the movies I looked forward to the most. And why I think Andy, Jorma, and I also followed this career path.
Producer Erica Huggins is the president of Seth MacFarlane’s Fuzzy Door productions. Her career spans film, television, and digital media. With a deep passion for bold, genre-spanning storytelling, she has shepherded projects ranging from What Dreams May Come to Flightplan to The Spy Who Dumped Me. Under her leadership at Fuzzy Door, the company has expanded beyond comedy into science and drama while continuing to challenge and entertain.
Erica, this is the first theatrical project released since you took the helm as president at Fuzzy Door. What’s this moment like for you?
Erica Huggins: You never know in the world today if you’re going to get a theatrical release on any movie. No matter what you think going in, it can always change. I think it’s pretty special that Paramount is as excited as we are about the movie. As we started to test, it became clear that there was an audience for this. If we can broaden the audience, that would be a nice thing, but there’s certainly the nostalgia factor. I think that social media is helping us with the meme-ability of these one liners coming out of a guy that everybody knows for one thing. So it’s surprising to the people who haven’t seen the original Naked Gun movies or don’t know the parody movie genre.
Liam Neeson is perfect for it.
Erica Huggins: Liam was uniquely qualified for that because, first of all, he’d never spoofed himself in a movie, which so many dramatic actors already have. He and Seth MacFarlane had a real connection because they [had] worked together before several times, so they had talked about this a decade ago. The idea of his gravitas, gravelly voice, stature, and clarity of exactly what a dramatic action star looked like and felt like, fit perfectly in a new, modern telling of the Naked Gun story.
Comedy is often subjective, how did you find the right balance and tone?
Erica Huggins: It was a trial by error. Akiva, Dan Gregor, and Doug Mand came together to write the script. They knew about Liam, who was already attached. There was a clear sensibility from Akiva. I had worked with Dan and Doug before, as had Akiva, so we knew what we were all going for, and we wanted to make it feel original to 2025. That it is its own thing, even though the homage is to one of the best comedic movies ever. We all walked in with this reverence for that.
I think you have to balance the level of what worked then and what could possibly work now. For every joke that you see on the screen, there were 10 or 12 more that we did on the day. That was part of the process. I think it’s definitely an SNL process. I’ve worked with several people from SNL before, and that’s Akiva’s background. But the best joke wins. Then you can keep going and try different things on the day. That was part of the secret sauce, because it has to be right for the audience. It can’t just make us laugh.
Do you have any strong core moviegoing memories, specifically around comedy?
Erica Huggins: I remember seeing Young Frankenstein in a theater with my parents at a revival house. I’m old, but I’m not that old. It was just such a thrill to see it in a theater. There were different kinds of movie houses when I was growing up in Los Angeles. There was the Fox and the Bruin in Westwood, but there were also lots of places that you could go to see an old movie.
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