| By Fred Topel
In Theaters Feb 10
|
When you interview Steve Martin, you don’t meet the pratfalling funnyman you see in the movies. You don’t even meet a wisecracking smart-alec. Sometimes overly serious, at the very least you are going to have a sincere conversation with a professional. An artist, yes, but not an abstract Bohemian. There is a method to Martin’s madness, and he can explain turning into the silly imbecile Inspector Clousseau like it’s a science.
“There are so many different kinds of comedy,” Martin began. “There's silliness, and I think that this movie has it all in that there are verbal jokes. There are big jokes. There are little tiny jokes. There are jokes from character. There are impossible jokes. Things that could actually never happen in life and that's what I loved about the original Pink Panther movies. It did it all. It had quite a range of rising and falling of levels of comedy and to pull that off, usually you must start with the comedy and stick with that tone all the way. I think that our movie is actually quite consistent in tone, but I don't know how you get from the tiniest little verbal joke to some falling out of a window joke and still have it feel coherent which it does to me.”
Taking on a remake of The Pink Panther means more than just coming up with jokes. Martin had to recreate a look and a voice that belonged to Peter Sellers, particularly a French accent that only exists in the movies.
“I worked on it with a great accent coach named Jessica Drake and I just walked around for months and months before the movie started talking with my little accent and she taught me some nice rules, four or five rules and then it's all about making it funny too.”
With homework assignments like that, Martin found himself becoming Clousseau at inopportune times. “I would find it coming out a bit like that sometimes, and of course the people that I know are sick of me. 'What are you doing over there?' There was a lot of talking with the accent. My dog got the most punishment of all having to hear it.”
Martin even wrote an entire scene in the script that is essentially the single joke of Clousseau saying the line, “I would like to buy a hamburger” over and over again in his accent. “That was one of the easiest scenes to write in the movie because once I had the idea I knew that all I had to type was 'I would like to buy a hamburger' over and over and over. And then it would either be funny later or it wouldn't, but it was only funny through delivery. Certainly not on the page. It just looked like, 'What?'”
When an actor like Peter Sellers creates a character like Inspector Clousseau, many fans cry foul at the mere mention of a remake. Martin approached that legacy with respect, but did not let it hinder him. “Certainly it's a total inspiration. I mean, he and Blake Edwards created this character that turns out to me is playable, is actable by someone else. And I noticed after we finished filming - I didn't look at the movies again before I started because that would just be too much influence - but I noticed that in the first film, The Pink Panther, he was in it just a little bit and he was almost English. He really didn't know what he had. I think that he was just working it out, and then in the second film, Shot in the Dark, he was more French and in third film the accent got really silly. He was kind of all over the place with it. You could watch him learning in the films what the character was.”
Once Martin decided to star in the remake, he focused on making it his own. “You think about it at first and then you don't think about it anymore. You realize that this feels new to you, and it's almost an intellectual issue. Once you’re making the movie you bear down and you make the movie, and you can't be thinking about the gods of comedy above you.”
As cowriter of the script, Martin could control all aspects of the comedy. Though almost nothing was too dumb for Clousseau, Martin has been known to veto such ideas in his other films. “For example, in Cheaper By The Dozen II, the studio said, 'We want a food fight.' I said, 'Absolutely not.' You see that in every single movie, in everything. It's the dumbest comedy idea. But in this movie I like the physical scenes that are actually clever because I think that's what keeps a physical scene going. It's moving from one little place to another and it has a logic to it rather than just bumping your head.”
Martin is signed for one more Inspector Clousseau adventure. With remakes proving a big business for him (Cheaper by the Dozen, Father of the Bride et al.), Martin has no qualms about letting some new comedians try out his own movies. “I wouldn't do that [myself], but I wouldn't mind it if someone did. I mean, if someone said, 'We're remaking The Jerk,' I wouldn't have a problem with it. My movies stand on their own, and I've either done a good job or a bad job.”
Some of Martin’s characters, unfortunately, are no longer viable to him. There will be no more Wild and Crazy Guys, even when he hosts Saturday Night Live. “I can't revisit old material. I just can't perform it. People ask me to say excuse me and I say, 'Actually, I can't. I just can't.'”
After a busy spell of working, with three movies coming out in several months, Martin is now taking a step back to evaluate his next step. “I intend to sit still and just see what comes out. I want to write something. It's been a while. This is the last thing that I wrote really.”
The Pink Panther opens February 10. |
