How Paul Feig Broke His Longstanding “No Sequels” Rule To Make ‘Another Simple Favor’

Director Paul Feig admits that in making his latest film Another Simple Favor, the sequel to his 2018 hit comedy A Simple Favor starring Anna Kendrick and Blake Lively, he found himself choosing to rethink his usual filmmaking methodologies – including his longstanding rule to avoid making sequels at all.

“I don’t do sequels,” Feig explained at a Deadline Contenders Television panel for the film, which bows on Amazon Prime Video on May 1, noting that he’s long resisted helming a sequel to his megahit Bridesmaids. “Sequels are hard…Audiences, I think, got burned by a lot of sequels. And so the big question for an audience is always, why do I need to see this? And so you’ve really got to be able to answer that question.”

But Feig said his enduring affection for the first Favor film’s characters fueled his interest in figuring out a fresh approach: in the follow-up, Lively’s character Emily is released from prison, and much to the surprise of Kendrick’s Stephanie, who’s built a cottage industry of books and podcasts about their first encounter, Emily asks her to serve as a bridesmaid at her Italian wedding, and Stephanie can’t resist trying to untangle the intrigue.

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“This one just felt like, ‘Oh, there is a way into this,’” said Feig. “Everybody was like, ‘How are you going to get her out of prison?’ I’m like, ‘Come on – Marvel brings people back from the dead. We can get somebody out of prison!’”

Feig revealed that, even after working with two screenwriters to develop a fully greenlighted script he was pleased with, he decided to use the production pause caused by the writers’ strike to dramatically overhaul the story.

“It just gave us time to sit with it,” he said. “And as much as I loved it, reading the comments of fans of the movie and how excited they were about the movie and kind of speculating what it would be, I kind of realized what we had wasn’t really what I think they wanted. It was more of a caper. Really fun, but it didn’t have the ability to have the amount of style and fashion and twists that I wanted in it, and I think everybody else wanted. So we kind of scuttled. We kind of kept act one the same, but really changed acts two and three, and I’m really happy we did because we just found some really fun, fun stuff.”

The result is a throwback to a film genre that’s little seen in the modern era. “I wanted this to feel like an old Hitchcock movie – the first one I always called Suburban Noir, and I do the same with this and that,” the filmmaker explained. “I like thrillers or tense stories that take place in broad daylight, because I feel like it’s easier to make things scary of it’s dark and you can’t see in the shadows, but if it’s just a nice day out and horrible, weird things are happening, I think that’s really kind of scarier to me, and more suspenseful.”

Check back on Monday for the panel video.

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