Interview: Reid Carolin (“Magic Mike”) — Part 4

One of the surprise hit movies of 2012 was Magic Mike starring Channing Tatum, Matthew McConaughey, and Olivia Munn, and directed by Steven Soderbergh. With a modest production budget of $7M, the film grossed $167M worldwide. The screenwriter responsible for the script is Reid Carolin.

Recently Reid and I had an extensive conversation in which we covered a whole range of subjects including his diverse creative background, the production company he and Channing Tatum have, the stunning success of Magic Mike, the craft of screenwriting, and much more.

In Part 4, Reid talks about the remarkable success of Magic Mike and its possible sequel:

Scott: The film has a documentary style feel to it.

Reid: Yeah.

Scott: Was that Soderbergh’s vision, or is that something you and Channing had an idea about early on?

Reid: That’s Steven. When we wrote it we wanted it to feel like a Hal Ashby movie, or like Saturday Night Fever. Those movies have this kind of…I call it a ’70s movie feel. But where you just got your buddies, and you had a script about real people, in a real world, and you just set up the camera and filmed it, and you saw what came out.

You hit the certain buttons that you needed to hit, but the movie evolved as a present tense thing. I think that’s what Steven did. He committed to making a movie in the present tense.

He would walk into a scene, decide how he wanted to set up the camera, tell the actors to go do their thing, and he’d let the takes go on. He’d let them find out what the scene was. He wasn’t ever manipulating the scene too much.

I think that’s his brilliance and that’s why his movies, a lot of them, feel that way. “Side Effects” is much more crafted than “Magic Mike,” because he’s deliberately making a thriller, and in our movie, I think he was deliberately trying to let this world come to life. He really wanted you to feel like you were in that dressing room with these guys just hanging out. I think that’s the way he decided to shoot it. Everything is in these wides. There’s not a lot of cuts. It really does feel like a doc in some ways.

Scott: I’m guessing there was a lot of improvisation on set.

Reid: There was. There was a lot. Funny enough, most of the stuff is pretty scripted, most of the scenes almost exactly follow the beats of the script and the general pieces of dialogue. It’s that everybody, especially Channing and Matthew, just put a layer on top of it. There’ll be a line in the script that’s the first quarter of something that Matthew said, and then he just goes off with it, because he totally knew who that character was, and the same thing with Channing. Most of it, it’s not like we’ve walked in and said, “All right, hey, guys, you’re in the dressing room. Just start talking to each other, and Mike, come in and say a line here.” Most of that was pretty structured out, what everybody was doing and saying. But everybody brought something extra. It wasn’t like we just truly improvised everything, but it was really loose.

On the day, it would just be like, “Who knows whether we’re going to be on script today or not? I have no idea.” It just depends on if Matthew is feeling these lines or not. Otherwise, if he’s got a whole other concept of what Dallas is going to say to the audience today, he should just say that. Because he knows the part better than I do. He knows the part better than Steven. We had actors who knew who their characters better than any of us could have.

Scott: It sounds like, then, that you’re pretty adept at wearing the writer’s hat and the producer’s hat.

Reid: Yeah. Look, I saw this quote from Aaron Sorkin, where he said, “I don’t ever want a director or an actor to change a word from the script because…” I don’t know why. I forget the justification that he used to say it. But I saw the quote, and I thought, I’m sure there’s a world where as a writer, you feel like “I’ve slaved over this, and this is a piece of art.” Every time you move away from it, it’s like a domino falling in the opposite direction and it’s not knocking down the next one, and all of a sudden, the whole thing feels out of whack. I can understand how that feels.

I really don’t think it’s the right way to make a movie. I really think you have to know what the big dominoes are, and those are the things that are going to fall in order to make a complete story, and you think of that before you go.

But really, you’ve got to be committed to the fact that you’ve now brought all these other artists on, and you’re going to treat them as what they are. Which is they are all artists in some way, shape or form, and they all have something to bring to it. They all have personal experiences that can reshape their parts and what they’re going to say.

You have to be present and let them show you how your preconceived thing is going to evolve. The movies that are done that way, I tend to think I like a little bit more. As a producer, it makes it easier, even though you’re having to deal with all of these people. I really don’t like having to do the whole, “Stay on the script,” saying, “We’ve already got the movie pre-made in our heads, now let’s go on set and just execute it.”

I don’t like those movies, I don’t like the way that they feel. I know what those movies are, and they feel like they’re conceived in a boardroom, and then they’re just executed by those who worked on them, and I don’t like those.

Scott: Are you surprised at the box office that Magic Mike has generated?

Reid: Completely. I mean we all kind of knew when we were making it, that even though a lot of people said, “What are you doing?” and “This is not going to work.” We all kind of knew we were onto something, because sometimes you know when you’re making it, you just know. We’re onto something that is special, and we’re onto something that people will want to talk about and they want to share, they want to know about. Whether or not traditional movie people think it’s right, regular people are interested, and the stuff that we were shooting was shining.

But for it to open to $40 million dollars, no. I mean, we knew when it was opening, that traditional tracking was saying high teens or mid teens or something like that. We also looked at the Internet and saw that we were generating more buzz than The Dark Knight.

We just said, “We have no idea, but we’re going to bet on this thing, we’re going to believe in it.” One of our producers, Nick Wechsler, I think is the only one who from the beginning to the end said, “This is going to do huge business,” and he never wavered from that.

One of the reasons why I love Nick, is when he believes in something, he believes. All of us said, “Who the hell knows. I don’t know. Did we make a good movie? Did we make a move that people won’t like?” We didn’t test very well, we tested at a 52 on that movie.

Scott: Seriously, a 52?

Reid: Yeah, or something. It was the low 50s. We walked out of the screening with Warner Brothers and everybody, and we literally felt depressed, because we were like, “The movie played well, why did it test at a 52? I don’t get this.” But some of the greatest movies of all time have tested in the 50s. Steven was smart enough just to know, “OK, I have to change some things, but don’t let this make me overhaul the entire movie.” Because we had a broad audience, we were in a big theater. It wasn’t a girl’s night out thing. It really helps you realize, it’s all about how you package and sell something these days.

You’ve got to make a good movie, let the movie stand on its own two feet. But just because it doesn’t test well, doesn’t mean you have to change the movie. You have to realize, did we make a movie that we like? That we think works? And if we did, now let’s figure out how to sell it.

That’s what Sue Kroll, Warner Brother’s President of Marketing was an absolute genius with. She understood who our audience was and how to get to them, and so did Channing. The two of them, I think, just crafted a great campaign, and that I think is the reason why we did the business that we did.

Scott: Now you’re on the cusp of sequel world. Is that going to happen?

Reid: [laughs] I’m not writing it yet, but I have made an outline and we are moving forward. I can’t tell you exactly when or exactly who and how it’s going to be done, but we’re going to do it. I’m 99 percent positive we’ll be doing it very soon.

Tomorrow in Part 5, Reid digs into some key aspects of the screenwriting craft.

For Part 1, go here.

For Part 2, go here.

For Part 3, go here.

Please stop by comments to thank Reid and ask any questions you may have.

Reid is repped by UTA.

Twitter: @reidcarolin.