Paul Feig Dishes on Sculpting the Play-Doh Movie and the 'Ghostbusters' Reboot
Paul Feig (Getty Images)
On Thursday night, news broke that Bridesmaids and The Heat director Paul Feig will direct a movie based on Play-Doh, the colorful toy modeling clay. If that sounds like a crazy idea to you, don’t worry: Feig knows exactly where you’re coming from.
“Honestly, when it was first brought to me and they asked ‘Can you make a movie out of this?’ I thought the same thing, like ‘What the f—- do you do with that?’” Feig tells Yahoo Movies. “But if you think about it, it’s just claymation. All Play-Doh is is multi-colored clay. What greater playing thing?”
Feig, who also has a sci-fi comedy called Other Space debuting on Yahoo on April 14, could only give two small details about the film at this point: It will probably be a mix of claymation and CGI animation, and that it’s being written by Jason Micallef (who, funny enough, wrote another comedy about a shapeless substance, 2011′s Butter) based on a pitch that “is one of the funniest pitches I’ve ever heard in my life.”
And if you don’t believe him, Feig requests that you at least keep the cynicism to yourself until the film comes out (after all, look at what people were saying about The Lego Movie before that became a hit).
“The problem with the business in general is that stuff gets announced and nobody knows any context for what you’re going to do or what your idea is, and so all they have is the ability to just lose their minds,” he said. “That happened on Ghostbusters. They come from a place of thinking you’re going to do the absolute worst version of whatever it is that they think you’re going to do…. A lot of times you want to go, ‘Just wait!’”
Feig noted that when it was announced that he would produce a rebooted, computer animated version of The Peanuts Movie, some fans screamed that he was ruining their childhoods. And last year, when his all-women Ghostbusters reboot was made public, a certain un-enlightened wing of the internet levied that same accusation.
“That’s why I wanted to reboot Ghostbusters, because then I’m not tainting anything other than a general idea if you end up not loving it, versus, ‘oh look what he did with Dan Aykroyd and the Peter Venkman character,’” Feig said. “That seems like more of a peril than just taking a property and doing it again.’”
As for that Ghostbusters reboot, which will star Kristen Wiig, Melissa McCarthy and Saturday Night Live stars Kate McKinnon and Leslie Jones, Feig said that it will not be connected in any sort of multiverse with the other Ghostbusters reboot that’s in development with Captain America: Winter Soldiers filmmakers Joe and Anthony Russo.
“Honestly, that has nothing to do with us at all,” Feig said. “It was a surprise when it was announced, and it remains a surprise. All I’m doing is concentrating on mine.”
