HOLLYWOOD, Calif. — Adam Sandler, Kevin James, Chris Rock, David Spade, and Rob Schneider head up an all-star comedy cast in Grown Ups, the story of five childhood friends who reunite thirty years later to meet each others’ families for the first time. When their beloved former basketball coach dies, they return to their home town to spend the summer at the lake house where they celebrated their championship years earlier.
Sandler came up with the idea of a guy who feels like he and his family have lost their perspective of what’s important in life. So, when he unexpectedly has to go back to his home town, he decides to use it as an opportunity to get back to his roots and get his family on the right track. To do this, he rents a lake house and invites his old friends and their families to come and stay with them for the Fourth of July weekend.
“The whole project was really appealing,” says director Dennis Dugan. “These real-life friends get together for a summer to make a movie about friends who get together for a summer at a lake house. It’s a bittersweet reunion, because their coach has died, but they’re also happy to see each other. They’re meeting each other’s families – it’s them and their wives and girlfriends and kids and dogs – at a moment when they’re all transitioning in their lives.”
The underlying sweetness to the story proved to be the key in bringing the all-star talent together. “It’s a really, really good script that Adam wrote with Fred Wolf,” says Schneider. “It’s very funny and it has interesting characters. Dennis really encouraged us to make it real – get out there, play around with it, and make it a natural performance.”
As Maya Rudolph puts it, “There are a lot of funny people in this movie, but it’s not just a lot of funny people in this movie. It’s a movie about old friends played by people who really are old friends. You can see that history come out in the relationships.”
Watch: Grown Ups Behind the Scenes Video
Once Sandler and Wolf finished the script, it wasn’t hard to get everyone on board. “Adam’s whole idea was that everyone would bring their families and we’d all have a nice summer at the lake house,” remembers Dugan. “It was one of the best summers of my life. Because everyone knew everyone else so well, it was like going to a really great party. Adam really wanted that kind of atmosphere to come across in the movie.”
“Adam created something special for all of us,” notes Salma Hayek. “All of our children are about the same age, and mostly girls, and they all bonded immediately. It was really a family environment – it was perfect.”
“We wanted the whole movie to have a nostalgic feel and element to it,” says the production designer, Perry Andelin Blake. “Everything harks back to a simpler time. The movie really is about getting back to family, roots, and being together with people.”
So the real-life chemistry between the actors would translate seamlessly to the characters they play on screen. In fact, many of the stars of Grown Ups have known each other for years. Rock says, “Most of the guys met at Saturday Night Live. I met Adam doing stand-up 20 years ago easily at Comic Strip in New York. We just hit it off when we were the younger funnier guys in the club. Spade I met at SNL. Schneider I met at SNL.”
“When the SNL stories came out, I’d just see Kevin sort of fading away,” laughs Schneider. “Honestly, though, it seemed like Kevin is cut from the same cloth. Having done stand-up comedy and surviving, he gets it.”
“If you hang around comics or comic actors a lot, you sometimes see really competitive guys: ‘Oh, he just told a joke and now I’ve got to tell a better joke,’” says Dugan. “But this set was really relaxed – partly, I think, because Adam brought everybody together. Everybody came in with a great attitude – ‘Let’s just start riffing and see how much fun we can have.”
In the movie, the five characters are supposed to have enough natural basketball talent that as children they could win a local championship. However, the guys agree: only Sandler and James have game, with Spade and Schneider a step back, and Rock bringing up the rear. “I’m OK – I have a few trick shots,” says Spade. “Sandler’s the best of us, and Kevin’s pretty good. I’m OK, Schneider’s OK… sorry, Rock.”
“I am not an athlete,” admits Rock. “Can I play? No. I couldn’t play when I was young, but at least then, I played a lot, so I found ways to contribute. Now that I’m older, I really suck. It’s just horrible.”
“Sandler and I are the best. I say that like it’s close. It’s not – the rest of them suck,” says Colin Quinn, who plays one of the former opponents from their hometown who has stayed and raised a family in town. “There’s no other way to describe it. This is the problem, or maybe the good thing, about comedians – they all have the confidence. They’ll shoot 50 air balls in a row, and then they’ll mock you if you miss a shot. But that’s all right – it’s how it is.”
To train for the big basketball rematch that closes the film, the filmmakers brought in former NBA player Pooh Richardson to work with the guys on their basketball skills. “I thought, ‘OK, we aren’t supposed to be that good,’ so I thought we were just going to run and goof around with Pooh,” says Spade. “But he got there and he had us run plays. We ran a zip 45, bounce pass, switch around, underneath, reverse layup. It was fun – we learned about 18 plays. We never got any better, but we looked really cool.”
The job of balancing all of the talent and realizing the vision for the film falls to Dugan, a veteran Happy Madison collaborator. “I’ve lost count of how many movies I’ve made with Adam,” he jokes. “I’ve done four movies with Rob Schneider, three with David Spade, three with Chris Rock, and this is my second with Kevin James.”
It’s not an easy thing to be the man in charge of a film with 18 principal actors. Just one example: “The logistics of the funeral scene,” Dugan remembers. “Each of the five leads has to have his hero shot. Each of the characters is meeting each of the other characters. There are about 600 extras. You have to keep everybody’s spirit up for six days while you’re doing the same scene over and over again so you can get all the coverage and close-ups you need. And since this scene is at the beginning of the movie, when the audience is getting to know these characters that we’re going to follow, you have to go into the editing room and figure out how to make it shorter and funnier and livelier. It was crazy.”
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