ARTICLE FROM TOTAL FILM (May 2000)

Q. You're number two in our best comedies of all time

David: Who got number one?

Q. Monty Python's Life of Brian

Oh, that's an excellent one! We're in good company.

Q. Do you have any theories about why Airplane! has such enduring appeal?

There was nothing like it before. No one had ever done a comedy without comedians

Q. Why did you cast people such as Leslie Nielsen and Peter Graves who were known as serious actors?

That came out of growing up thinking that the funniest thing on TV were all those old, serious movies. If you watch a movie like Zero Hour, Sterling Hayden is pretty funny, and so are the guys in the cockpit. The other thing we had is the concept of overdubbing serious movies, like Woody Allen did in What's Up, Tiger Lily? Only we were going to do it casting the movie. Rather than redubbing we decided to just buy the rights to Zero Hour and then we rewrote it as Airplane!

Q. Was Leslie Nielsen your first choice for the role of Dr Rumack?

He wasn't even our second choice. We thought maybe Charlton Heston at one point. At that time Leslie was a well-known character actor. People didn't know his name, but they recognised his face. the casting director almost quit. he said 'Leslie Nielsen?! Leslie Nielsen is the guy that you cast when you can't find anyone else!'

Q. Did the studio want big names?

The studio wanted to get people like Chevy Chase or Bill Murray. we love those guys but they wouldn't have been right for Airplane!. Some of the middle-level Paramount execs acted as kind of a buffer. They'd call up these guy's agents and say: "You don't really want your client in this movie, it's really not very good."

Q. Did you believe it would be successful?

Yeah, we actually did because we had been trying to get it made for six or seven years. We had spent many years telling people that Airplane! would be a big hit that we really weren't surprised.

Q. Was there a lot of improvising on the set?

No. We'd argued over every word in the script, so when an actor would want to paraphrase, we'd kind of gasp and say 'No, read the line!'. Lloyd Bridges I remember tried to make sense of his dialogue. He would say: 'My character wouldn't say this. How about this instead?'. And finally Robert Stack said 'Lloyd, nobody's watching us anyway: spears are going into the wall, watermelons are falling from the ceiling. Just keep talking!'

Matt Mueller, Total Film, May 2000