The following contains spoilers for The Adam Project.
Before we go any further in my exclusive interview with Ryan Reynolds and director Shawn Levy for The Adam Project, just know Levy suggested using “Ryan Reynolds Husk Fucks the Space Time Continuum” as the headline. Trust me, as you get further in this interview, that suggestion will make sense.
But let me back up a second.
Before The Adam Project started streaming on Netflix, I was able to conduct an extended and wide-ranging interview with Reynolds and Levy for their fantastic new movie. While I already posted the spoiler-free section where they shared some great stories about making The Adam Project, balancing all the different tones, what it’s like making a movie at Netflix versus the legacy studios, what they learned from test screenings, and so much more…I held back all the spoiler talk.
In today’s installment, Reynolds and Levy reveal how the Face/Off joke happened (it’s when Mark Ruffalo is first seen teaching in front of the classroom), what it was like filming the bar scene between Jennifer Garner and Reynolds and why the scene means so much to him, how Levy used the camera to help the audience get emotionally closer, and filming Zoe Saldana’s awesome introduction where she kicks ass while Led Zeppelin is playing. In addition, we talked about Saldana’s death scene and the way she plays so many emotions, Reynolds’ reaction in the truck driving away, how they came up with some of the great dialogue that Walker Scobell delivers, and how they came up with the ending of the three of them playing catch.
Since I know some of you like watching video, while others prefer reading, I’m offering this two ways: you can either watch what they had to say in the player above or read the transcript below.
If you’re a fan of Reynolds and Levy and The Adam Project, you’re going to love what they had to say.
COLLIDER: I'm going to jump into spoilers now, and I have some questions. So I love the Face/Off joke in the movie. I want to know, could you talk about how that joke came about?
RYAN REYNOLDS: Really wish we could have thrown some headphones on Walker in an action scene with some Louis Armstrong playing and a single white dove arcing across the screen John Woo style. The Face/Off thing was just a totally random... Kate Vorhoff, who runs B for Effort, which is my wife's production company with my wife, gave that to me as a Christmas present and I thought it was awesome. And we happened to be shooting The Adam Project over that period. So I called Shawn or I think I sent a photo of it to you, Shawn. So we got to put this in and I know just the spot. Next thing you know, we are rewriting Mark's scene together and we added this little piece about it and that's-
SHAWN LEVY: That's another example of what I was saying, what people don't know. Tiny, little, random, instinctive, weird shit ideas, they pop up all the time. And on our movies, we'll follow those leads. They end up taking a lecture hall university scene and giving it like this weird little moment that is idiosyncratic, and for us, makes the character more interesting, makes the scene more interesting. Those are the kinds of random little ideas that you stumble on along the way that we'll always follow those leads.
Speaking of the bar scene, like everybody else, it's one of my favorite scenes in the movie for multiple reasons. I love what Jen says, kids are assassins of happiness. Ryan, you say, boys always come back for their mamas. You can see and you can just feel the emotion between these two characters. Ryan, I know this scene was very important to you. I know this movie is very personal to you. Can you talk about working specifically on that scene? Because the audience feels so much emotion looking at your face, looking at Jen's face and what you guys are saying.
REYNOLDS: Well, Shawn can speak to the macro of it, but yeah. Look, to me, it's the ultimate wish of moment scene. It's a moment where you get to sit across from a parent as a peer. There's always that moment that you never want to rob any child of, which is that moment where your parent becomes a person. There's something very magical about that. Also, there's something very emotional about that. So to me, these are all things that are very real to me. My dad was a difficult man. He was not an easy guy to know really, less about him being a difficult personality, but more, he is a really difficult man to know. That is all in this movie.
The idea that we tell ourselves stories about parents or stories about people to adjust to the narrative we have about ourselves, or to explain the narrative we have about ourselves. That narrative isn't always true. The story that we tell ourselves isn't always true. And I like that that happens. But you know the line, boys always come back for their mamas, is a real line. That's something that we've said to my mom, my brothers and I, when my dad died. We showed up for her. It's something we always say in our house, do we show up? I say it to my kids, what do we do? And my kids will say, "We show up."
And it means that you show up for people. Sometimes it's not convenient or fucking perfect or anything, but if you show up for people in life, they're going to show up for you and everything. Everything about your life is going to be better with that kind of integrity. That was a big part of my story. I think that was in that bar scene, which is one of my favorite scenes in the film, for sure.
Shawn, if you don't mind, I want to actually talk to you about directing the scene because I love the way you shot it. It starts out where the camera's static. Then as Ryan says, "Aren't you grieving?" It starts zooming in slowly. And as you're cutting back and forth, you're zooming in closer and closer, until finally at the end, you have two relative closeups, but they're not fully close up, but I love the way you directed the scene. Can you talk about how you figured out, speaking earlier in the interview where you're like, how do you shoot something? There's a million ways to shoot it. Talk a little bit about how you decided to shoot it like that.
LEVY: It is all just how I want it to feel. So at first, she doesn't know this stranger. He can't believe his mother is sitting down the bar from him. There's a little bit of wariness. I have the cameras stay put and keep its distance. But as these two characters reveal themselves to each other and as there's emotional connection, they're getting emotionally closer. So I want to get emotionally closer to that character too, to that actor. So just for the true film nerds watching this, Steve, I'm just going to correct you, they were Dolly ins, not zoom. Big difference. Big. Come on.
I know. Listen, I'm an amateur doing this job. Eventually I'll figure it out.
LEVY: Somewhere, people are like, "Sawn Levy and zoom. What is he, like a 70's-"
REYNOLDS: You're Robert Altman.
LEVY: I wanted to get more intimate with the characters as they got more intimate with each other. So I literally moved the camera on both sides through space to get spatially more intimate with them. And I didn't even think about it in those terms. That's much more academic in my wording than I would ever think on set, but that's just what it felt like. So that's how I wanted it to feel visually too.
Zoe is fantastic in the movie, and I love her introduction. She comes into some badass music. She kicks a tremendous amount of ass. I love the scene so much. Can you talk about how you guys decided that was going to be the introduction to the character and how you picked the song?
LEVY: I feel like we're going to go back to that same theme of people don't realize how random little moments can be movie defining. Ryan and I, like on Free Guy, the rhythm of our post-production is we'll shoot. I'll spend a little time getting it into shape with my editor of 15, 16 years. Then Ryan comes and basically, we live together are in the edit room every day, long days, fun days. And we go through every single cut in the movie. So we're up to that scene and we're like... Ryan had this idea early on. Actually, in the opening scene in the movie, he's like, "I think music..." Our goal all along was to make not a sci-fi movie, an adventure movie, a wish fulfillment film movie.
So, music and needle drops, became important so that you're telling the audience it's okay to have fun. We're watching that backyard scene and we're just playing songs from our iPhones. I remember I was just scrolling through, this is Led Zeppelin on Spotify, and I came to “Good Times Bad Times.” I hit play. I said to the editor, "Hit play on the picture." So it's just the tinny music coming from my iPhone, picture on the screen. We're like, "Oh my God, this is... Holy shit." And we just all felt it in real time, just off the iPhone. Then it became the saga of getting Led Zeppelin's permission and Netflix's permission to spend what it costs to get a Led Zeppelin song, but it all worked out and it makes for, I agree, a truly badass entrance for her character.
REYNOLDS: Sometimes, but also there's the song in the bar is a Matt Berninger song called “Let It Be,” which is just a random... I just had listened to it that day. I think the song had just come out the day before. It just spoke to me so much about who this character was, a guy who was really struggling to let things go, just cannot let things go despite knowing he should let it go and wanting to let it go. Shawn laid it in perfect. It just worked. We never changed it. I think that was from the day we shot that scene was when we laid that song in basically, and it just stayed forever. So music, it’s either right or it isn’t. You just know right away.
Another scene that I think is so good is Zoe… These are very specific things, but basically when Zoe is killed, her reaction on her face is so fucking good because you are seeing everything play out all on her face. And then, you also have Ryan, to commend you, when you’re driving away, your emotion in the truck. These are really great performances. Shawn, can you talk about-
LEVY: I am so loving you right now because you just flagged two of my absolute favorite moments in the movie where we all know, Ryan Reynolds, he's been famous a long time, but man, on that scene, I mounted the camera to the truck and I said, "Ryan, drive away. You're driving away from the only woman you've ever loved," and he just brought it. It's in the kind of scene that we don't see Ryan do every day and it felt special and it felt raw. The same thing, Zoe is staring down her own death. And there's not a line of dialogue, and she plays 17 different emotions as camera slowly pushes in. It's one of Ryan's and my favorite moments too.
I have to tell you, I feel really lucky that this movie has a lot of famous people in it, but they're not doing just the things you expect. Zoe Saldana, Jennifer Garner, Ruffalo, Ryan Reynolds. These are great performances and their performances that have a different level of nuance and dramatic content than we're necessarily used to seeing in some of their movies. I feel like the lucky guy who got to have those moments in my movie. I'm really grateful.
Ryan, can you talk a little bit about filming that scene, and also looking at Zoe's performance, if you don't mind sharing?
REYNOLDS: Well, Zoe, look, it's not often that you get to work with people whose work you're very familiar with, but then they get to work in a movie that you are in and a part of making and they are revelatory. I said that to Zoe and I said that to Jen, who both have these just intense, emotional scenes in the middle of this film that I feel like we're seeing colors or sides of them that we've never seen before. That's always really special to me. That's always when I feel like we've done something really great is that you're you feel like you're seeing somebody very well, but they are also a revelation. In terms of the driving away, to me, that scene is all about a guy who is as irresponsible and as impetuous as any human being on Earth because he's willing to completely unravel and husk fuck the space time continuum because he wants to be with his wife.
He's willing to basically just destroy the fabric of the universe to be with his wife. That does not make him a hero. That makes him just genuinely the world's most irresponsible human being. So I think in that moment, he's feeling the weight of this, this moment that I came back for this person who is so much smarter than me and she understands the significance and the gravity of what we've done here. And all of that was for not. I'm about to lose her anyway. I think that's just a moment of pure rage at himself, at myself in that moment.
But another scene I wanted to talk about is there's this great bit where young Adam is reacting, Ryan, to your body and asking if he's going to get laid. Basically, it's just really funny, and it's also just true. Because you've just been told that time travel exists. You don't care about that. You just want to know if you're going to get a girl. These are the kinds of lines that I laughed a lot because it resonates. So, can you talk about how much was that, again, is that improv? Is that stuff that, Ryan, you're doing advance? Is that in the original script? I'm just curious where some of these lines come from.
REYNOLDS: Yeah, I don't know.
LEVY: I remember more than Ryan. Ryan never remembers what he wrote. The way Free Guy worked is the same way Adam Project worked. We had a very solid script and then Ryan and I came aboard and we saw the movie that we wanted to make. And then we take the script and we do a pass at just polishing up mostly dialogue so that the script is hitting the stuff that we want. So before we shot Adam Project, it already had a healthy dose of our writing on top of, and in collaboration with Jonathan Tropper's writing. So yes, a lot of that dialogue was baked in before we shot. But there's one moment that I remember was Ryan...
And the only other person I've ever seen do this at this level was Tina Fay. She's really good at writing improv dialogue that is making fun of herself. There's a moment where Ryan said to the kid, because Ryan's wearing a tank top and whatever, and Ryan has the kid go, "So when does all this happen? And does everyone skip leg day in the future?" It's literally Ryan acknowledging that his legs are not quite as beefy as his shoulders and the rest of his upper torso that his on camera. I do love that it's Ryan writing mockery about his own body and shoving it into the mouth of a young boy.
REYNOLDS: Yes, it is an honor, a distinctive honor.
LEVY: By the way, Steve, if you do struggle for a headline, I just want to make this super easy for you, Ryan Reynolds husk fucks the space time continuum.
REYNOLDS: Yeah. There's your headline.
That will not be the headline, but I appreciate the suggestion. Something about that, although that's really funny. Listen, before I run out of time though, I do want to talk about the ending. Did you guys always have everyone playing catch and with Mark saying to Ryan, "I love you. I'm really proud of you." There's a lot of emotional beats at the end, and I'm just curious how that came about. And was it ever something else?
LEVY: It was never something else, but I knew I wanted to not shy away from that catharsis at the end. I like movies that make me feel a lot. I just, again, I felt lucky that I had my guy, now one of my greatest friends of my life in Ryan, and we're making a movie that is a blast in action and funny, but also gets to be a drama in some moments where it counts. It just felt thrilling to me. It still feels thrilling to me. So that ending was always built in that there was going to be a goodbye. We were never going to give it a happy ending, but we had to give it an ending with closure and redemption. So we did a little rewrite on it, but then we shot that scene. We started rehearsing it, Steve. And literally, after less than a full rehearsal, I felt, oh, it's happening. It's coming. So let's just, no more rehearse. We shoot. And Mark, from take one, brought it. Ryan, I remember Ryan saying, "I just needed to listen. I just locked into Mark.”
REYNOLDS: All I had to do literally is just look at Mark and feel everything, every unrequited moment I've ever had with my own father in real life. Truly, I felt so lucky to be working with someone like Mark Ruffalo, who is as good, if not better than everyone already knows him to be. And then the catch stuff, that's all for me is incredibly resonant. That is how I connected with my father. When my father, who's now been dead for six, seven years, all of my memories that are beautiful with my father are us having a catch on the lawn. That is in the movie, but that's also true of my real life, which is my dad always had time for that.
Even though we didn't see eye to eye on just about everything, we always had time for that. So, there's something very powerful and moving about us getting into that place after we have this incredible healing moment between all of us, the three of us really, that we end up on the lawn having a catch. But I just think there's something so magical about and such wish fulfillment about me, I would love, I would kill, I would do anything to have a catch with my old man when he's my age or around that time right now, to be out on a lawn and throw a ball with him just for a few minutes and just see him as the three-dimensional person that he actually is, instead of this mythologized either super villain or superhero that we tend to create in our minds to make everything else make sense.
It's also one of the reasons why the film hit me, and I think a lot of people, is that while watching this, I was thinking about my father who has also passed, in terms of meeting him at a younger age and knowing who he was because... You know what I mean. We all see our parents for what they are, but not as the humans they are. Now that we're all getting older…it's beautiful in the way that the wish fulfillment, and I think every person can relate to it.
LEVY: Well, it's certainly a big part of why we wanted to make this movie and why we feel really lucky that we did.
Yeah. I could ask you guys a million other questions, but I think that the publicists on this thing will kill me if I go any longer.
LEVY: Here's the good news, Frosty. We're going to make so many more movies together. You're going to get more bites at this apple.
The Adam Project is now streaming on Netflix.