Todd Phillips Discusses His Approach To The Belushi Biopic
I’m still on the fence about this idea of another John Belushi biopic being developed by Todd Phillips. It could easily wind up being a bunch of random moments of Belushi’s life, mixed in with his SNL sketches, and some of his movie highlights… and it may just be a clusterfuck of a piece that ends up paying tribute to the late actor/comedian by impersonating him – something along the lines of MAN ON THE MOON, which wasn’t bad but wasn’t great either. We just wound up learning nothing all that new about Andy Kaufman. On the other hand, if Phillips pays careful attention to telling the story of who Belushi really was, what his troubles were, and takes a honest look at the guy, much in the way that RAY did with Ray Charles, I could get on-board with this.
For the first time since word spread that such a project was in the works, Todd Phillips was willing to discuss with MTV News his approach to the material as well as where they are in the development process, and, seeing what Phillips had to say on the matter, I feel a bit more confident that he may be able to pull this off and pull it off well. It seems to me that he is being extraordinarily careful with getting this movie just right, because anything less than that would be something closer to WIRED. Granted, this could all be bullshit… telling us what we want to hear, so we’ll leave him alone to make whatever the hell movie he wants. But it really sounds like Phillips has a deep emotional connection and respect for the memory of John Belushi, and making a movie that Belushi could be proud of being loosely associated with is a top priority.
“That’s something that gets released by some agent of somebody and then you get asked questions about it. It’s in its very nascent stages.”
“Our goal is not to do a traditional biopic approach with it that people expect, whether you’re talking about ‘Walk the Line’ or ‘Ray.’ All good movies, but our goal is not to make that typical biopic. We want to make a movie that, if John Belushi saw it, he would be happy that it captured his spirit. Sometimes I feel that they don’t entirely capture the spirit of the person they’re about. Our goal is to capture the spirit of Belushi, not necessarily make a straight-ahead biopic.”
“One of the reasons I’m being a bit vague is because we haven’t nailed it yet. It’s in early stages. I’m really talking about the very television-narrative approach that a lot of biopics take. We don’t want to do that. We’re trying to take a very renegade approach to who I think was one of the most renegade comedy actors of all time… It’s about nailing the script down at this point. If it’s a new face or if it’s someone people are familiar with, we haven’t figured that out yet. It’s not even so much about nailing down the script as the renegade approach to a renegade actor.”
The non-traditional biopic approach is really what has The Kidd intrigued, and puts my mind at ease a bit that, unless this is absolutely ready, we won’t see it. Phillips has done excellent work before on OLD SCHOOL and THE HANGOVER, and, while I’m not crazy about what I’ve seen of DUE DATE so far, the potential is there. This would push him into far more serious areas than his other films, and that’s not a bad thing. I can’t knock a filmmaker for trying to do things that challenge themselves rather than sticking with the same comfortable familiar formula. I really hope Phillips nails this, because not enough people remember John Belushi these days. They remember his less talented brother. But they don’t remember how hilariously funny John was. And, if for no other reason than I’d like to see more people appreciate his genius, I’m starting to slowly warm up to the idea. And it only took this little bit of writing from myself to sway me.
Funny how that works sometimes.
