Saturday Night with Jason Reitman and Guillermo del Toro (Ep. 498)

The Director’s Cut - A DGA Podcast

Directors Guild of America

Tv & Film

4.6 • 806 Ratings

🗓️ 31 October 2024

⏱️ 32 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Director Jason Reitman discusses his new film, Saturday Night, with fellow Director Guillermo del Toro in a Q&A at the DGA theater in Los Angeles. In the conversation, he discusses originally conceptualizing the film as a one-take to play out in real time, recording the score live on set with the film's Actor and Composer Jon Batiste, and casting his Actors for how well they understood their characters' deeper interests over their recreations of sketch work. Seen through the eyes of a young Lorne Michaels as he juggles equipment failures, actor fights and producers pushing for reruns, the film follows Lorne and his troupe of trailblazers behind the scenes leading up to the landmark show’s first airing. See photos and a summary of this event below: https://dga.org/Events/2024/Dec2024/SaturdayNight_QnA_1024

Transcript

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0:00.0	We interviewed every living person we could find who was in the building on October 11,
0:04.1	1975.
0:05.2	It started with Lorne and Dick Ebersoll and Rosie Schuster and then every writer, every actor,
0:10.3	the production designer, people from the art department, the costume designer,
0:13.7	Billy Preston's band, NBC pages, literally anyone we could find.
0:17.7	Paul Schaefer, Howard Shore, who wrote the original theme.
0:20.8	And all of their stories
0:24.2	didn't add up.
0:26.0	Everyone contradicted each other.
0:28.0	But what we did was
0:29.0	we knew we were going to
0:31.0	write the movie based on geography.
0:37.4	Music Hello, and welcome back to the Director's Cut, brought to you by the Directors Guild of America.
0:56.8	In this episode, the premiere of Saturday Night Live is thrown off the rails with 90 minutes to airtime
1:02.1	and director Jason Reitman's biographical comedy, Saturday Night.
1:07.0	Seen through the eyes of a young Lorne Michaels, as he juggles equipment failures, actor fights,
1:12.1	and producers pushing for reruns, the film follows Lorne and his troop of trailblazers
1:16.7	behind the scenes leading up to the landmark show's first airing.
1:22.0	In addition to Saturday Night, Reitman's other directorial credits include the feature films,
1:26.6	Thank You for Smoking, Juno, Young Adult, Tully, and Ghostbusters Afterlife, and episodes of the series, The Office, and Casual.
1:37.8	He was nominated for the DGA Award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Motion Pictures for his 2010 feature up in the air.
1:47.0	Following a screening of the film at the DGA Theater in Los Angeles, Wrightman spoke with director Guillermo del Toro about filming Saturday night. Listen on for their spoiler-filled conversation.
	...

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