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Bullseye with Jesse Thorn

Akiva Schaffer on 'The Naked Gun' reboot , The Lonely Island and more

Bullseye with Jesse Thorn

NPR

Society & Culture

4.52.6K Ratings

🗓️ 5 August 2025

⏱️ 50 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

There’s probably nobody better to direct and write a movie like The Naked Gun reboot than Akiva Schaffer. He has a resume full of brilliant, dumb, joke-a-minute work. Together with Andy Samberg and Jorma Taccone he is a member of the comedy trio The Lonely Island. Akiva wasn’t sure he wanted to direct The Naked Gun at first, he gets into why. Plus, why Popstar: Never Stop Never Stoppin’ didn’t click with audiences and his very funny work with The Lonely Island.

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Transcript

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0:00.0

Support for NPR and the following message come from the Walton Family Foundation,

0:05.1

working to create access to opportunity for people and communities by tackling tough social and environmental problems.

0:12.0

More information is at walton family foundation.org.

0:17.1

Bullseye with Jesse Thorne is a production of Maximumfund.org and is distributed by NPR.

0:23.6

It's Bolzai. I'm Jesse Thorne. It used to be every summer, you get maybe two or three of them.

0:42.7

Big, over-the-top spoofs, the kind where you get a joke every minute. Wordplay and silly visual

0:50.1

gags and, you know, fart jokes and stuff.

0:57.7

And pretty much all of those movies would be hits.

1:03.7

I mean, not like Marvel tent pole hits, but tens of millions of dollars.

1:12.2

Big blockbusters where the emotional climax is a kiss scene that gets interrupted by, I don't know, like a cameo from John McEnroe or whatever.

1:15.2

These days, there aren't a lot of those.

1:18.0

And when you do see them, it's just on streaming, you know, you watch it once, it's nice

1:24.7

enough.

1:26.5

Enter 2025s The Naked Gun, starring Liam Neeson and Pamela Anderson, directed by my guest, Akiva Schaffer.

1:34.7

It's a reboot of the series of films starring the late Leslie Nielsen, all of which are classics.

1:41.9

In this Naked Gun, Liam Neeson stars as Frank Drebin Jr., the son of Leslie

1:47.0

Nielsen's character. He is a dumb cop, a violent cop, an often charming cop who works for the LAPD.

1:55.4

His partners are all dumb, violent, often charming cops. The villains he encounters are all dumb, violent, and

2:03.8

often charming villains. Naked Gun, like its predecessors, is a very dumb movie in the best way

2:10.6

possible, a straightforward spoof comedy that, if there's any justice in this dumb, dumb world,

2:16.2

will herald the return of the summer comedy blockbuster. And there's any justice in this dumb, dumb world will herald the return of the summer

2:18.7

comedy blockbuster. And there's probably nobody better to direct and write a movie like

...

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