Saturday Night director Jason Reitman and cast including Gabriel LaBelle and Rachel Sennott give Brian Formo the scoop on their favorite SNL moments, performing in front of Willem Dafoe, and more.
That adrenaline coursing through my veins on Saturday night as I heard the countdown happen was unlike anything I’d ever felt before.
—Jason ReitmanSaturday Night Live is back for its 50th season, and it’s already receiving a bounty of anniversary goodwill. With Maya Rudolph, Dana Carvey, Jim Gaffigan, Andy Samberg, James Austin Johnson and Bowen Yang tackling the significant figures of the 2024 election cycle, the hallowed series has already posted its highest ratings since… well, the last election. And to commemorate the airing of SNL’s very first episode on October 11, 1975, Jason Reitman’s latest feature about that very event is releasing nationwide across the US on the same date.
The Juno and Up in the Air filmmaker didn’t take the traditional route by dramatizing the months or weeks of chaos and rehearsals that led to a groundbreaking series. Instead, Saturday Night distills numerous interviews that Reitman did for research with the original cast and crew who laid the groundwork for the show, and positions all the chaos leading up to the first airing as a 90-minute pre-show countdown. Premiering at this year’s Telluride Film Festival, Saturday Night “blew the roof off” the festival, Matt notes. He adds in his four-star review: “Perfectly captures the chaotic energy, camaraderie and backstage shenanigans of putting together the first SNL in real-time. Crisp editing, long takes, a witty script with big laughs and a talented, hilarious ensemble who are having a ton of fun through the noise and uncertainty.”
Reactions upon the film’s public release in other festivals and limited coastal theaters have been a bit more varied than they were in the Rocky Mountains. Josh writes in a two-star review out of TIFF that Saturday Night is a “huge win for people who love impressions and pointing at things they recognize.”
We sat down with director Jason Reitman and much of his cast to talk about the lively shoot. “As we were shooting, we were constantly thinking, what is the camera seeing? What is the camera not seeing? Is there even one soft moment in any shot?” Reitman says about the constant activity in the film. “We can’t let two seconds go by without the audience seeing something new, and without there being two, three layers deep of any given shot.”
It’s that chaos that Letterboxd are responding to with either great positivity or dismissal—very little in the middle. “The thing is Uncut Gems has unfortunately been too influential, now everyone thinks they can pull it off,” notes Hungkat, while Phoebe, conversely, enthuses, “Really liked it… As I, too, have seen the disaster show episode of the prematurely canceled Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.” Someone who knows the grind behind making a television episode, writer and comedian, Demi Adejuyigbe shares the feeling: “Reeeeeally enjoyed this. Could call it Aaaaand Cut! Gems at times. A visual treat to me, beautiful blocking, beautiful production design, beautiful, beautiful 16mm.”
Yare gushes that “you just can’t go wrong with a cast like this one (save me Rachel Sennott and Ella Hunt!). It had chaotic energy to spare and a great soundtrack. By the end I had the biggest smile on my face,” and Alex shrewdly splits the difference between the lovers and the haters, saying it’s “as funny as Saturday Night Live and as unfunny as Saturday Night Live.”
Keep smiling: here’s all the takeaways from our chat with Reitman and the cast.
When asked for their favorite Saturday Night Live performers and sketches, Reitman chose one standout from each era, with Gilda Radner, Steve Martin, Eddie Murphy, Adam Sandler, Kristen Wiig, Lonely Island, and Please Don’t Destroy making his massive Mount Rushmore. The filmmaker highlights Martin and Radner dancing through the audience in 1978 as one of his favorite sketches, combining both slapstick and an earnest musical movie skill. That sketch “is as deeply emotional today as it was back when it was done,” he explains. It also highlights what cast member Tommy Dewey points out of the show’s genesis: “If you look back at some of those old sketches, they are twelve minutes long and not necessarily going for three laughs a page.”
Dewey, who plays Michael O’Donoghue, the first head writer on SNL, chooses Phil Hartman and Jan Hooks as his earliest highlights. “Maybe it was naïve of me, but I didn’t appreciate before how maverick it all was at the start,” he says. Dewey also shouts out the commercial parodies that Gabriel LaBelle’s Lorne Michaels argues should confuse the audience as to what’s real and what’s fake; singling out Chris Farley’s berserk rendition of a Folger’s “hidden camera” commercial that was actually playing at the time.
Most of the Saturday Night cast grew up during the Will Ferrell and Kristin Wiig era, but VHS compilations—and later YouTube—opened up more performers to them. Both LaBelle and Rachel Sennott (Rosie Shuster, Michaels’ wife and a writer on the show, who is also in a relationship with Dan Aykroyd, played by Dylan O’Brien) would perform sketches to their friends at school. “That was such a big part of finding comedy and growing up for me,” Sennott recalls of getting her first iPhone to practice re-enacting the viral digital shorts.
“My buddies and I would recreate the sketches at recess, whether it was [Ferrell and Molly Shannon’s] cheerleaders or [Chris Farley’s motivational speaker],” LaBelle details, adding that Saturday Night Live was a connecting experience—not just with his peers but also his parents. “It’s really unifying generations. It was really bonding for my parents and I because it was something [we both loved], and not, like, The Addams Family. I love The Addams Family, but [Saturday Night Live] didn’t feel like this old thing your parents are showing you from when they were a kid. It was for us as well.”
Despite that variant success in speaking to generations, Saturday Night Live is largely an American institution. For British castmate Ella Hunt (starring as Gilda Radner), Coneheads was her introduction to the sketch program. “That movie was huge in my family,” she says of the alien comedy that originated as a recurring SNL sketch in 1977, and was subsequently turned into a 1993 feature film. “But [Saturday Night] has really been the crash course. It has given me such an iration for the bravery of that style of comedy.”
Jon Batiste, who plays house band leader Billy Preston in the film, also performed its score. The Grammy and Oscar winner (Best Original Score for Soul) wrote the musical interludes on set after watching playback from the day’s scenes with Reitman. That, plus the production having auditorium seats like an actual television studio, turned the set into a natural hangout spot for the large ensemble.
Dewey notes that many actors, on their days off, would just watch footage in video village and that many would stay after wrap to witness Batiste recording the score. “One day, Willem Dafoe just hung out in the audience,” Reitman says. “All the young actors kept coming up to me saying, ‘Willem Dafoe’s just watching us. I don’t know how to do this while Willem Dafoe’s watching us.’ He got a total kick out of it.”
Dafoe plays the VP of Talent Relations at NBC, David Tebet, who decides whether the show does indeed go on that night, or if NBC should just air a rerun of The Tonight Show instead. In between his scenes, Dafoe told Reitman, “You know what I love about your movie? No edge of frame. I don’t know what the hell is on screen.”
Reitman huddled and trained the background extras on handling various pieces of equipment so that there was always authentic hurried, show-running movement behind the rehearsal sketches. The director also used the stage setting to forgo personal trailers for actors, instead creating essentially a “cast camp”. A perfect environment for Dafoe to wander the set and watch.
Long before starting Saturday Night, during Juno’s award-season run of late winter 2007, Reitman was a guest writer on Saturday Night Live, which he calls “a childhood dream.” He explains: “I got to write till four in the morning with Simon Rich on a Tuesday. On Wednesday, I had three sketches that went into the table read, and I got to experience the moment where they come out of Lorne’s office, pin a piece of paper on the wall, and you find out if your sketch made it—and one of mine got in. That adrenaline coursing through my veins on Saturday night as I heard the countdown happen was unlike anything I’d ever felt before.”
This experience of working in Lorne Michaels’ writers’ room was the starting point for Saturday Night. While the film counts down to airtime, it also mixes in rehearsals of classic early SNL sketches performed by the film’s cast. These weren’t a part of the first show, but would go on to define the program as it found its subversive legs.
“We interviewed anyone we could find that was in the building on October 11th, 1975,” Reitman explains. “Writers, actors, crew people, band , Lorne. What we’re dealing with is a collection of memories—memories from before, memories from after. For example, Rosie Shuster, out of nowhere, just started talking about the hard hat sketch and what that meant to her and the women on the cast.” In Saturday Night, Hunt as Radner teaches women construction workers how to objectify a man walking by—O’Brien’s Aykroyd—and Sennott’s Shuster oversees how short his denim shorts really are. “We were allowing the people who were there to define what memories they had that were important to them from that moment,” Reitman says.
As expected, there are already plenty of Letterboxd thirst reviews that note their appreciation of seeing O’Brien in booty shorts. “That scene where we get to objectify Dan Aykroyd in a pair of short shorts was one of my favorite days shooting on anything I’ve made,” Hunt adds. “It was interesting to learn about the first women of SNL—Gilda, Laraine Newman, and Jane Curtin—all of them talking about how a lot of men in the space didn’t think that there was a place for women in comedy. They didn’t even know the strides they were making. They were [just] seizing the opportunity to be a bit transgressive, a little bit bad.”
Playing Garrett Morris, the first Black cast member of SNL, allowed actor Lamorne Morris to perform the transgressive “Get Me a Shotgun” moment from the first season’s “Death Row Follies” sketch. Instead of it being scripted as a sketch, it was performed similarly to how Garrett came up with the song: in the film, it’s performed as a sound check. But for the SNL cast member, it was a response to something that happened in 1950s television, when an elderly white woman sang the offensive inverse of the song on Art Linkletter’s Truth or Consequences, which then went to commercial as she performed to a horrified audience.
“To get on national television and sing a song in front of white America and say, ‘I’m going to get me a shotgun and kill all the whities I see,’ and have them laugh, that lets you know that this show was onto something,” Lamorne Morris says. “It’s pushing the envelope forward—and it’s okay to be a bit racy and challenging in humor.”
In the film, Garrett Morris is wandering the set in lamentation of how he’s utilized in many of the sketches and is trying to figure out how to put his classic theater training into effect. (Lamorne Morris himself fittingly studied theater at DuPage College on a Chris Farley Memorial Acting Scholarship.) Reitman inserts the iconic rendition not as a sketch but as a moment of performance that reaffirms Garrett’s abilities to the cast and crew—to great comedic impact for the viewing audience. Nehemiah writes of Saturday Night that “the whole theater clapped after ‘I’m Gonna Get Me a Shotgun.’”
Cory Michael Smith plays Chevy Chase in Saturday Night, a version full of cockiness as the show is starting—before getting knocked down hard by J.K. Simmons’ Milton Berle, in perhaps the film’s most memorable scene. Berle was nicknamed “Mr. Television” because he was so widely watched, as he famously once had more than 80 percent of American television sets tuned into his show. “The look on your face as he rips the shit out of you!” Hunt laughs, about the insult Smith took from Simmons. We can’t print the jab here, nor would it the NBC censor test, but Nezar calls it “comedy gold”. “You see the world come down,” Hunt says to Smith.
“With Chevy, we’re talking about the fragility of ego,” Reitman says of his character. “What is it like to be Chevy Chase, touched by God when it comes to comedy—a physical comedian with an incredible wit, who is also navigating a very tricky ego? How does that confront the last generation, [someone like] Milton Berle? Talk about ego and talk about also someone who was about as successful as they come in vaudeville and radio. That confrontation is everything we want in this movie as far as two generations coming head-to-head.” While Simmons steals the scene, it’s also a moment for Smith to come back from and regain his confidence. He “steals the spotlight, but knows that it’s his time” to let the rest of the cast shine from there, Reitman adds.
Smith is playing a comedy icon in the film, but his co-star Nicholas Braun takes on the duty of portraying two in Saturday Night, acting as a pair of legends on opposite ends when it comes to style of performance: Andy Kaufman, the confrontational “song and dance man” (as he preferred to be called, instead of a comedian), and Jim Henson, the creator of The Muppets. Henson elicits some of the loudest laughs from the audience, but it’s primarily from his looks of horror at how the Saturday Night Live writers, and in particular Michael O’Donoghue, treated his puppets. Patrick took note, questioning the film’s “weird anti-Jim Henson agenda.”
“Speaking as Tommy Dewey, The Muppets are great. They’re legendary, I love showing them to my two-year-old,” says Dewey, who plays O’Donoghue. He adds: “Jason [Reitman] is not creating the antagonism that existed between Michael O’Donoghue and Jim Henson. That was real. O’Donoghue hung a Big Bird by the string of his blinds in the office. There’s all these interesting tension points in the movie, right? Internal tension from [John] Belushi not g his contract and refusing his costume; External with George Carlin dealing with amateurs; Dafoe and J.K. as the suits. There’s all these adversaries to the show, internal and external, and Henson was considered not a fit by some internal people—it caused tension.”
As Saturday Night Live starts its 50th season, Reitman’s film is primarily a celebration of what Saturday Night Live pulled off, and all the icons it launched. However, with Billy Crystal (played by Nicholas Podany) delivering an ultimatum on how much time he needs for his sketch and the writer’s treatment of Henson, the film doesn’t posit that Michaels and crew got everything right. That would be boring. And above all else, Reitman did not want the film to be boring.
‘Saturday Night’ is currently screening nationwide in the United States and Canada from Sony Pictures. It will start its release internationally at the end of October.
