Warning: spoilers below for “The Naked Gun.”
Leslie Nielsen would be proud.
Director Akiva Schaffer, 47, has revealed that he “threatened to quit” the “Naked Gun” reboot to save a scene that the movie’s other writers wanted to cut.
“It was polarizing in script reads,” Schaffer said on Monday’s episode of IndieWire’s “Filmmaker Toolkit” podcast. “People I really respect, like Andy Sandberg, when he read it for me, he was like, ‘Snowman’s the best. Do not let them cut it,’ knowing it would be cuttable.”
“It makes sense once you see the movie, but at one point I did have to threaten to quit,” he added.
The “polarizing” montage in question comes when Frank Drebin Jr. (Liam Neeson) and Beth (Pamela Anderson) share a short romantic getaway in a snowy cabin.
After using a magical spell book to bring a snowman to life, the pair engage in a threesome with the snowman until he suddenly turns violent.
Schaffer, who co-wrote the reboot with Dan Gregor and Doug Mand, admitted that he did cut down part of the montage just in case it was completely removed from the film.
The Lonely Island alum was ultimately proven right when the sequence became “the No. 1 scene” in the entire movie.
“After the first test screen, it was the No. 1 scene in the movie,” Schaffer said. “The people who really fought me on it after ate a lot of crow without me asking. I tried to let them off the hook easy, and go, ‘That’s fine,’ but they were like, ‘No, dude, we were wrong.’”
Elsewhere during the podcast, Schaffer revealed that they only included the snowman montage as a throwback to the original 1988 “Naked Gun” starring Leslie Nielsen as Frank Drebin and Priscilla Presley as Jane Spencer.
In the original, Nielsen and Presley’s characters appear in an absurd scene that shows them running hand-in-hand on the beach and laughing during a showing of the dark war drama “Platoon” while Herman’s Hermits play in the background.
“We got to the point in our script, we were like, ‘Wow, this love story deserves a montage,’” Schaffer explained. “The original ‘Naked Gun’ has a very famous, very good montage set to ‘I’m Into Something Good.’”
“We knew it had to be different than that,” he continued. “And then also, there’s been 30 years of making fun of montages, whether it’s ‘Team America’ doing a montage or whatever, there’s not a lot of room left in the montage. We were debating not doing a montage and had a few other ideas.”
It wasn’t until the “Hot Rod” director got up to use the bathroom late one night that the snowman idea popped into his head.
“When I got back in bed, it had been percolating that day in the writers’ room, and I just saw the entire thing and wrote it into bullet point notes, and then texted it to Dan and Doug,” he shared. “The next morning, I came into the writers’ room and they were like, ‘Yeah, done.’”
But Schaffer was not the only one to “love” the “polarizing” montage, because Pamela Anderson has also spoken about how much she enjoyed shooting that particular scene with her rumored new beau, Liam Neeson.
“I remember Liam and other people saying, ‘What is this?’” the “Baywatch” alum, 58, told Entertainment Weekly. “But I was like, ‘It makes perfect sense to me.’ It feels like Akiva’s signature.”
“I know he fought really hard to keep that in because as things grow and then there’s budgets and they figure out what they want to use, he was insistent that had to stay in,” she added. “He’s throwing himself on the sword for that one, so he knows something we don’t.”
Anderson joked that it was even more fun filming the snowman montage than watching it.
“She was in bed with us, so the threesome with the snowman was quite interesting,” Anderson said of the snowman’s puppeteer. “There are very specific rules dealing with people in costumes — you’re not supposed to directly talk to the puppeteer. And this was a full-on, Hansen-level costume.”
“Inside, there’s a person with these night vision goggles, or whatever you want to call them, in there telling which way to turn,” she added. “It’s very, very complex. It’s very robotic.”
