December 2005

Spotlight on Matthew Broderick:

Never a Day Off Anymore...

How can anyone not enjoy this guy? He was the loveable, dashing Ferris Bueller as a kid and now he's one of the King's of Broadway! Join us as we sit down with this surprisingly mulit-faceted performer... Mr. Matthew Broderick.

By J.P. Mangalindan, The Cinema Source

It’s not unusual to recycle material, adapting a Broadway play or musical to film and vice versa. Even in this case, The Producers is a special case: As source material, it’s proven to have amazing longevity in its multiple incarnations, first as a surprise hit movie in 1968, then an award-winning Broadway musical in 2001, and now, a movie again. Who would have thought a movie based on a musical based on a movie would ever come to fruition? Certainly not Matthew Broderick, the star of the new film.

"The whole thing has just been shocking," says the 43-year-old two-time Tony winner. "I remember Mel [Brooks] saying, that he wanted to film the play and make a DVD or something, where they have these video trucks outside the theater. They can make it and do a nice job. He said, 'I don't want to do that. I know they'll do a good job and it'll still look a little like the film, but I don't want to do that.’ I want to make a big MGM-style musical. I was like, 'That'll never happen.'

“But with Mel, when he says things like that, he means it. And of course, Nate and I said, 'Well, who are you going to cast in it?' because with the movie, we didn't necessarily think he'd cast us. He said, 'No, I want you guys and I want Roger Bart and I want Gary Beech.' And sure enough, three years after that conversation, we were shooting in Brooklyn.”

Broderick plays accountant Leo Bloom who conspires with has-been theater producer Max Bialystock (Nathan Lane) to invest in “the worst play ever written,” a guaranteed flop that theoretically could make them both rich. After Bloom and Bialystock seemingly find the worst play ever written idolizing Adolf HItler, obtain the necessary funds from sex-starved seniors, and hire a talentless lead actor and director, the two producers can virtually taste the pending proceeds, but a turn of events result in unexpected success and an unforeseen turn of events.

Having created the role of Bloom on Broadway, Broderick found the process of adapting his performance from stage to screen an interesting challenge.

“It's not totally different, but we definitely depended on the audience a lot for timing of jokes, you know,” he says. “That's sort of what shaped the show originally, how the audience reacted. But, like any movie comedy, you just have to do it and assume that people will laugh later. That's just how they are.”

“Attention gets paid to very little details. One nice thing onstage is that they just fly by and nobody questions them and then suddenly, you start to overthink things. But the fun thing about filming this musical was we got to have lots of more stuff: more people, larger sets and the chance to do it in a bigger way.”

Filming an adaptation of a musical presents an added stressor to the cast, who, whether they subconsciously want to admit it or not, want to put forth their best face. While nightly shows of a musical allows its cast to experiment and perfect performances, with movies, it’s a one-shot deal. What ever take ends up on celluloid is watched and replayed over and over. It’s an epiphany the The Producers cast, Broderick particularly, knew all too well.

“Originally, we all thought, 'I've got to get this moment when it works best.' After a while, I found it works best to throw that away. You just have to find the best moment for the film and the best moment for right now. You can't try to do a kind of museum piece. I wanted to do the movie, for it to be alive as it was happening, not just be a mosaic of our best moments from stage. It has to work on its own.”

Still, is he worried about fervent fans of the staged musical?

“The stage version is still the stage version, like if you were there on one of those nights, that can't really be recorded,” he admits. “That's the essence of what it is. … There are movie musicals of plays and people often say, ‘I was there.’ So it's scary when people say this is the ultimate version and people wonder, ‘Is it, though?’ when really, it’s just different.”