Tom Cruise was up to his ankles in mud and pond water. He wore a look of great concentration as he stooped over a digital camera, trying to frame the perfect shot.
Shawn Levy glanced around in slight disbelief. Partly it was that he was on the set of his very own “Star Wars” movie, “Star Wars: Starfighter,” with Ryan Gosling. And partly it was the steady stream of A-list visitors. “Last week Steven Spielberg was here. And now Tom Cruise is wielding a camera, ruining his very nice shoes.”
It was a brisk morning in November and Cruise had dropped by from nearby London, landing his helicopter on set as the crew piped in the “Mission: Impossible” theme over the loudspeakers. Cruise just wanted to watch, he told them, but Levy, setting up a scene involving a lightsaber duel in the water, suggested the star jump on one of the cameras. He’d meant it as a joke. But there was Cruise, wading into the muddy pond, holding the camera like a pro.
“Now when you see the movie,” Levy said — it’s scheduled for 2027 — “you’ll know that part of it was shot by Tom. I mean, how cool is that?”
With his elfin grin and loud, easy laugh, Levy, 57, sometimes seems like a very enthusiastic boy. He rushed around the sprawling outdoor set cheerfully, almost giddily — a temperament well suited for the spectacular brio of a “Star Wars” film. “Hey, check this out!” Levy hollered during a brief pause in shooting a few days later, swinging a prop lightsaber and handing me another. “We can have a battle. I like to practice in between takes.”
Levy is “always very sparky,” Claudio Miranda, the cinematographer on “Starfighter,” said of the filmmaker’s on-set methods. “Other directors are a bit more —” he affected a scowl and sighed exaggeratedly. “But Shawn comes in fully charged.”
For Levy, that boyish pluck is what gets him through. “My dad called me yesterday and asked me how I’m doing. ‘Is the job stressful? Is it hard?’” he said. “I’m like: ‘Yes, this movie is more stressful and challenging than anything I’ve ever done.’ But also, my 10-year-old self is on set with me every day. That’s how I make movies.”
LEVY’S CHILDLIKE DEMEANOR belies a strong work ethic. Given the scale of his work — his budgets are often in the hundreds of millions of dollars — he is unusually prolific. In the last four years, he has directed (and served as a producer on) “Deadpool & Wolverine” for Disney and Marvel; “The Adam Project” for Netflix; “Free Guy” for what was at the time 20th Century Fox; and the TV mini-series “All the Light We Cannot See.” In November, while shooting “Starfighter,” he took a red-eye from London to Los Angeles for the premiere of the final season of “Stranger Things,” which Levy helped create and shepherd into production with his company 21 Laps. He returned to London to continue shooting the next day.
His sets are a master class in efficiency. He is time and budget-conscious, and unlike, say, the more brooding auteurs of the New Hollywood era, his artistic impulses never come before more practical considerations, like whether he (or the studio) can afford them.
“There is a breed of movie star and filmmaker that makes it a point of pride to spend all the time and all the money,” Levy said. “As if your creative appetite is so voracious that cost and schedule be damned. But I’m the guy the studios call when they want someone they know will take their investment seriously and deliver responsibly. It’s not the sexiest way to put it. But I’m a good worker. And I do take pride in that.”
Hugh Jackman, who collaborated with Levy on the 2011 robot boxing movie “Real Steel” and on “Deadpool & Wolverine,” agreed. “He’s equal parts producer and director,” he told me recently by phone. “You are never over time, over budget, over schedule. Everything is completely organized. You know exactly what you’re doing.”
In an industry where nothing is certain, the studios have come to see Levy as among the most reliable names in the business: not difficult, not temperamental and, most important, almost supernaturally attuned to audience tastes. Going by boxofficemojo.com, of the 15 studio features he has directed since 2002, all have at least broken even and most have been profitable. Even the few films that Levy himself describes as disappointments — “The Internship,” an inoffensive workplace comedy from 2013 starring Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn, “definitely underperformed,” he said ruefully — still recouped their production budgets, while the most successful, like “Night at the Museum” and “Deadpool & Wolverine,” are among the highest-grossing movies of all time.
It’s perhaps this record that appealed to Lucasfilm and Disney executives, who are eager to win back some good will for “Star Wars” after the widely perceived failure of the franchise’s recent installments, including “The Rise of Skywalker” and the spinoff “Solo: A Star Wars Story.” As much as “Deadpool & Wolverine” was felt to have righted Marvel’s ship amid a phase of superhero fatigue, there’s hope that the Levy touch can make “Star Wars” relevant again.
In keeping with his nice-guy image, Levy is modest about his commercial success. But he referred to something Spielberg told him on the set of “Real Steel,” which Spielberg produced: “You direct like you’re sitting in the audience.” It’s a remark that cuts both ways: Levy knows what audiences want, even if, critically, his movies are rarely well received.
“I’ve never forgotten that,” he said. “For better or worse, I am making movies like I would want them to look and feel and sound like if I were sitting in that dark theater. So maybe that’s it.”
LEVY GRADUATED from film school at the University of Southern California in the mid-1990s, when the vogue was for the kind of fast-talking action flicks made by Tarantino. Levy, born and raised in Montreal, went the other way, directing a pair of earnest, low-budget dramas for Mormon producers in Salt Lake City before moving into television with shows on Nickelodeon (“The Secret World of Alex Mack”) and the Disney Channel (“The Famous Jett Jackson”). In his early 30s, he was hired to direct “Big Fat Liar,” a goofy, prank-filled adolescent comedy that Roger Ebert described as “ideal for younger kids, and not painful for their parents.”
With “Cheaper by the Dozen,” “The Pink Panther” and especially “Night at the Museum,” Levy became, in his words, “the family comedy guy” — a label he refers to now with obvious embarrassment. “For years I was deep-down worried that I would never get to direct other kinds of movies,” he said.
Kathleen Kennedy, the head of Lucasfilm and the executive who tapped Levy for “Starfighter,” acknowledged his concerns. “He did family comedies, and that got reinterpreted as ‘lightweight’ — which is completely unfair,” she said in an interview on the “Starfighter” set. “It is so hard to do movies like that. It’s all I look for in directors, and it’s like a needle in a haystack.”
To dispel the lightweight rep, Levy formed 21 Laps and sought projects that were unlike the films he’d made — or the films he thought he was capable of making. In 2016, his team came across a script for a “lyrical piece of science fiction,” and believing that he was ill-equipped to direct it, he signed on as a producer and hired Denis Villeneuve, the Quebecois filmmaker known for stylized dramas like “Prisoners” and “Incendies,” to direct. “Arrival” was (yet another) hit, and Levy, as producer, was nominated for an Academy Award for best picture.
At almost the same time, Levy’s team discovered another sci-fi script, this one for television, written by the brothers Matt and Ross Duffer. He stepped in as a producer on the show, “Stranger Things,” for Netflix, and though it was outside his wheelhouse, directed several episodes himself. The series and its distinctive style may be synonymous with the Duffers, but the brothers insisted that “Stranger Things” would not be what it is without Levy’s creative imprint.
“Ross and I are a little bit more pretentious than Shawn. He shook a bit of that out of us,” Matt Duffer said in an interview. “Shawn is one of the most earnest, sincere, emotional people I know, and all of those qualities started to come into the show to a greater degree than we’d planned.”
Doing “Arrival,” and even more so “Stranger Things,” gave Levy the confidence to branch out, moving on to Marvel movies and eventually a new “Star Wars.”
“It taught me what I can be as a filmmaker,” he said, “which is far broader than just the family comedy guy who made ‘Cheaper by the Dozen.’”
IN A QUIET, DIMLY LIT HOTEL BAR on the outskirts of London, after a long day of shooting, Levy sipped a Bloody Mary and spoke fondly of his wife, Serena, and four daughters, one of whom had been on set that afternoon.
Despite the women in his life, a surprising number of Levy’s movies address fathers and sons. “Big Fat Liar” follows a 14-year-old boy’s desperate attempts to prove to his dad that he’s been telling the truth. “Real Steel” is about an estranged father coming back into a boy’s life and growing to love him. “The Adam Project” centers on a time traveler visiting himself as a child, then acting as a kind of father figure, and “Night at the Museum” is, at heart, the story of a man who takes a job he hates to impress his son.
If I didn’t know any better, I told Levy, I would think he had an estranged son. Or dad.
Levy, to my surprise, began to cry. He was close with his father, but he hadn’t always been, he explained. His dad left when he was 3. He was raised by his mother, who suffered from depression and alcoholism. At 13 — roughly the age of so many of his protagonists — Levy and his sister fled their mother’s home and reunited with their dad, an act of courage that Levy credits with saving his life but that also became the theme, though he didn’t know it, of so many of his films.
“I have never, ever connected it before,” Levy said. “I’m a little embarrassed, because you’re going to have to mention that I got emotional. But I could never figure out why I kept coming back to these stories of a 13-year-old boy being saved by a man. There was something defining about that moment for me. And with ‘Star Wars,’ I’m doing so again.”
The plot of “Starfighter” remains under wraps, but it’s set five years after the events of “The Rise of Skywalker” and built, Levy said, around yet another father-son dynamic.
As the evening came to an end, Levy was eager to return to his hotel room and call his father. “He’s never asked me about this recurring theme,” he said. “But you’d better believe I’m going to tell him tonight, because it will mean everything to him.”
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