“HE MADE ME REALISE THAT BEING FUNNY COULD HAVE POWER”
I WOULD NOT be a comedian or an actor if it weren’t for Ivan Reitman. Ghostbusters looms very large in my life: it’s literally my single favourite thing in the world (along with my wife). It has this anti-authority streak that runs through a lot of Ivan’s work. As a kid, you feel powerless. Watching these people not being taken seriously who then turn out to save New York and the world was a fantasy coming true for me. I think that thematically resonated for me, even if I couldn’t articulate it.
Watching Ghostbusters, I realised that being funny could have power. It felt like magic — if they could make scary ghosts funny, they could make anything funny. That’s a real superpower. And it also had this improvisational feel to it. The way they were speaking felt more like normal people hanging out, how my friends and I were talking (although we’re not nearly as witty). We’ve all seen a lot of comedy where the improvisation has gone off the rails and it just feels like two characters trying to make each other laugh. If you think of Peter Venkman in Ghostbusters, it’s all to serve his character’s point of view: with everything he says, you get to know him a bit more, or it moves the story along. Ghostbusters is the first time we see Bill Murray and go, “Oh, that’s the Bill Murray we know.” In Stripes you can see he’s working it out; in Ghostbusters, it’s fully formed. Obviously, Bill and Ivan were close creative partners, crafting who ‘Bill Murray’ was.
I think what Ivan’s work does at its best is go against the grain. Casting Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny Devito as twins is completely unexpected. His movies always felt a little dangerous to me. They were doing something that movies weren’t supposed to be doing. Animal House [which Reitman produced] has that. Stripes has that. Ghostbusters has that. Even Dave has that — it’s a movie about the importance of kindness over politics, and that in itself was a subversive idea at the time. I watched it the day I heard Ivan passed. That film is a miracle because it does so many different things. It’s really, really funny. It’s really, really warm. The chemistry between Kevin Kline and Sigourney Weaver is so good. It’s a kind, hilarious movie. A friend said Dave was Ted Lasso before Ted Lasso.
There are two things I’ve taken from his work.
Firstly, the importance of improvisation, of being present in the moment, trying to affect the other person’s performance. Ivan’s impact comes from the sense of improvisation that is now seen as ubiquitous in comedy. I think that started with him. The other thing is I always wanted my comedy not to feel mean. I decided to define my work, especially as a stand-up, by what I loved, not by what I hated. I think that comes from Ivan because the love he had for his characters is really palpable. There is nothing cynical about his movies. They are anti-authority but they are not political. They are open-hearted.
He’s also taken things that you wouldn’t think would be funny — ghosts, the army, politics — and put them inside the realm of comedy. That is something he has left us with: anything can be funny if you approach it with intelligence and humanity.