When I quit teaching and joined the CIA, I thought I was going to
be this amazing spy and I'm still just the same boring person I was.
We're giving you a new identity. You will no longer be Susan Cooper.
You're Penny Morgan, divorced housewife from Iowa.
That's a confidence builder.
You think you're ready for the field?
Get away from me!
Dammit!
I love the spy genre.
I've always found it to be, you know, just so much fun to watch
and I love action and all that, but I also felt it's a great arena
for comedy, but it's always been done spoofy and like a parody
and I loved those movies, but at the same time I thought,
"Can we make a real spy movie and still make it really funny?"
Part of Paul's process is really thinking about,
"Is everybody going to get along?"
Like, how do we all meet and kind of mesh together?
And I feel like everybody kind of saw the same movie which,
I mean, thank God, that would be terrible if it didn't happen.
But everyone just kind of seemed to flow into the same kind of feel.
I think Paul, you know, at the helm of that had a lot to do with it
but everybody knew to play it real, play it serious
and yet still play the comedy as hard as you could.
Patrick.
I was given specific instructions by Elaine
to tailor these gadgets to you.
Oh!
These are not yours.
This anti-fungal spray can freeze and disable any security system.
Wow...
It's also a pepper spray.
That's a... That's a pretty good idea. All right, well, next time.
She has to remain incredibly smart and incredibly capable.
She can been unpractised and nervous
and even a little unsteady in her confidence,
but you always need to see the skill and the intelligence, or else...
Or else then, I think, it gets a bit bumbling
and then I think it gets silly where I think watching someone try really
hard to do something that they can if they just muster the gumption is fun.
When you see The Heat and Bridesmaids,
you sort of know what Paul's all about and it's that kind of...
It's real and it's genuine and it's warm and it's dry,
but it's also kind of crude and edgy and spotty, it's kind of got it all.
So I knew... And I read the script and although he improvises a lot,
it was all there.
And when he said he'd written a part for me,
I knew that he would sort of harness a bit of the Miranda character,
because that's what he'd known and kind of started from.
You play it too safe.
"Just blend in, let somebody else win.
"Making a wave isn't always brave."
"Give up on your dreams, Susan."
She used to write that on my lunchbox.
Melissa is allowed finally to play someone who is terribly, erm,
sweet and good-natured at the beginning and she's so good
and become known so much for her sort of expletives, if you like.
But with this, you really see a journey,
so at its heart, it is very warm and I think...
Coop, her character, is very warm
and therefore the piece comes from a good place.
Tell me where the bomb is.
Ten seconds or you're dead.
Interesting.
I'm the only one who knows where that nuke is.
Well, then, in that case, I'd say you'd better start...
Oh.
I didn't do it on purpose. There's, like, a ton of pollen in here.
She and Paul have...
..evolved a process whereby they go with what's written
and then they have numerous amounts of alternatives
and then they just sort of amalgamate the lot together
and just see what comes out of the pot.
And you can't help but be moved to laughter
sometimes at where her mind goes
and, of course, what you're conscious of doing
and what I was conscious of doing was just trying to keep it straight
so that I didn't screw up great takes
where she was riffing on some insane new angle.
I mean, I think if I just did say the lines on the page,
Paul would be like, "What are you doing?!" So you're...
I mean, he's literally just yelling, "Say whatever. Go!"
Like, "Try it, try it, try it."
So it just stays loose and I think in that spontaneity is
when you actually, that's when I feel like you really make things funny.
Don't let me down, Cooper.
It was very challenging to sit across from Melissa McCarthy
and watch her go.
I mean, that woman is the most brilliant improvisational actor
I've ever... I just, I don't understand how someone's brain
can work the way hers does and how fast, quick and funny it is
and I just had to sit there and take it, you know?
SHE LAUGHS
I'd stay out of her way
and I didn't really know how to improv as the head of the CIA,
but, fortunately, Paul loves to... He works in such a wonderful way
where after he gets the scene, he starts giving you alternate lines.
"Now, say this. Now, say this." And you're just, you know.
He'll come in with a Post-it note and it's a new line
and you'll learn it there and then, which is really scary
and frightening, because... But amazing fun.
The person playing opposite doesn't know what you're going to say
so you get a genuine reaction or laughter from them.
So you're doing about 10, 15 alternative takes each time
so it's completely, it's a totally different way of working.
Completely fresh and really exciting/terrifying.
There's a bit where, like, when I first meet Susan in the film,
I do this kiss and then...
And then I go into like...
..kiss her, you know, like,
with open mouth.
And I think that was Paul's idea
and it wasn't in the script but somehow just him coming up with that
was so silly and big and stupid and it just really made us laugh.
I was frustrated with it, because I just thought Paul wasn't happy,
you know, and then after that thing, it all sort of clicked.
Hi.
Ciao, bella.
Oh!
Oh.
Like the shoe store found in American malls.
Oh, I'm Penny, like the penny.
Oh, like a penny!
Or like penne alla vodka.
Did you just grab my butt?
I think he wanted these real-time responses from other actors
that were in the scenes and you, you know,
getting something for the first time and not having to sort of
have any sort of bad habits come through
and just to be fresh and, you know,
he just said bigger is better and, for this particular character,
it was just the more intense, the better it became.
I mean, we tried it a lot and then, you know,
Paul's such a great director,
he knows what he's doing and you just go with what he knows.
We need someone to find the bomb without being detected,
but it can't be any of you. We need someone invisible.
I'll do it.
OK, thanks, lunch lady.
It was just so fun to see Jason Statham.
I'm so used to seeing him just playing these serious action heroes
and here he is just being,
just loving being completely silly and being really good at it, too.
Jason's such an intuitive actor and, you know,
when I saw the Crank movie, the first Crank movie,
I was like, "OK, he has a sense of humour.
"He gets how to be funny with the character that he's playing."
So I kind of knew he was just waiting for this
now big kind of comedic part so we wrote it for him
and then I had him come in early on just to do, like, a read-through
rehearsal and I remember the first thing he said, he kind of goes like,
"So, I shouldn't try to be funny with this, right?" And I said, "No.
"Just play this dead serious."
And so he just read through that script every line, I was just
in hysterics and he went through it all once and I said, "We're done.
"Don't rehearse it again. Don't look at it again.
"I'm not going to see you again until we get to the set."
Cos it was just like I didn't want to touch it.
So he's delightful to work with cos he just gets it.
With the comedy, you know, you can turn up the volume to 11
for the whole time and I think that's what Paul really wanted.
He wanted this intense guy that was convinced that no-one could
ever do or has done anything, like, close to what he's done.
What are you doing in my room?
We have to stop the sale of a nuclear bomb.
Did you forget I am undercover,
because you're not supposed to be here?
You really think you're ready for the field?
I once used defibrillators on myself.
I've jumped from a high-rise building using only a raincoat
as a parachute and broke both legs upon landing.
I've swallowed enough microchips to make a computer.
This arm has been ripped off completely
and reattached with this arm.
I don't know that that's possible.
Doing a spy movie's great,
because you want a comedy to have a strong driver
in the middle of it, that's why the first Hangover was so brilliant,
because it had this very strong thing that was pushing you forward
and then you can hang the comedy on that.
When comedy gets episodic or movies in general get episodic,
is when there's not a strong enough thing pulling you through.
We have such a shorthand. I mean, you know,
I'm about to do my fourth movie with him and it's because I love it.
I love how he works, I love that he's incredibly happy,
he loves his job and he makes the sets really fun.
He's also so collaborative that you feel really open to try anything
so you have people trying things that maybe they normally wouldn't try
and everything's not going to work.
But you get those few moments all throughout the film
where someone tried just a little more than they normally would
and it works and then you get all these great moments.
It is a great way to work, because you get new stuff
and stuff that is, you know,
it's priceless when it comes out and it's good.
You know, in the end you have such a craic making the film.
Subtitles by Ericsson