Like many filmmakers of his generation, Feig spent his childhood making Super 8 movies with his neighborhood buddies in a suburb of Detroit. Facing the abyss of failure so often has not only informed Feig's approach to comedy and storytelling, it's why, with the success Spy all but certain, the only thing Feig is sure about is that his hot streak could end tomorrow. Usually, he's found a way to navigate past it a few times, however, he's tumbled down so far that he wasn't sure if he'd ever find his way back up.
It's happened, in truth, with some frequency.
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It's about as dramatic a career turnaround as possible for a Hollywood filmmaker, but escaping his five-year stint in movie jail was far from the only time Feig's found himself standing at the precipice of a professional chasm. And in two weeks, Feig will start production on one of next summer's buzziest movies, the all-female reboot of Ghostbusters, starring McCarthy, Wiig, and current standout Saturday Night Live cast members Leslie Jones and Kate McKinnon. On Friday, Feig's secret agent comedy Spy, which he also wrote, is poised to give him his third blockbuster comedy in a row. Bridesmaids, of course, became the sleeper hit of of the year, and his follow-up, the buddy cop comedy The Heat starring McCarthy and Sandra Bullock, was the highest-grossing comedy of 2013. Just about everything else about his life, however, had transformed drastically.Īt 52, Feig is not only out of movie jail, he is quite simply one of the most in-demand comedy directors working in Hollywood today. I cannot face a screening with total sobriety."įour years later, Feig was back in Austin, crouched in a hip bar constructed from giant steel containers, a martini in hand, anxiously awaiting the 2015 SXSW debut of another studio comedy he directed starring Melissa McCarthy. "I remember getting in there and looking around, going, like, Oh, there's not very many women in here," Feig said with his typical deep, nervous chortle. What he didn't know was whether the rowdy crowd of mostly male film geeks packed into the 1,100-seat movie theater would appreciate his emotionally nuanced, character-driven wedding comedy starring Kristen Wiig, Maya Rudolph, Rose Byrne, and Melissa McCarthy, none of whom had headlined a studio feature before. The director had already watched Bridesmaids kill at several private rough-cut test screenings, so he knew the movie worked. "Because if I had another movie bomb, then I would be not only in movie jail, I'd be in movie dungeon." That film was Bridesmaids, and what had Feig so anxious was its semisecret midnight screening at the 2011 SXSW Film Festival, the first time the movie had been shown in public.
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"I'd really hit a point where I was like, well, that's it, my movie career's over."īut then producer Judd Apatow, Feig's friend and collaborator on the beloved 1999–2000 cult TV series Freaks and Geeks, called with a rare second chance, a female-driven comedy that he wanted Feig to direct. "I was firmly in movie jail," he told BuzzFeed News earlier this spring, not far from that fateful theater. He was about to debut his first feature directorial effort in five years, after his last movie, the 2006 kids comedy Unaccompanied Minors, had been such a disastrous bomb that it had delivered what Feig believed to be an irreparable blow to his professional life. There was a moment in the spring of 2011 when director Paul Feig realized his entire career rested on a single screening in a packed and unruly Austin theater.
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