The action comedy Get Smart revives the classic spy sitcom with Steve Carell and Anne Hathaway as CONTROL Agents 86 and 99. The two stars and director talk to Russell Baillie
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For Steve Carell, it was a familiar feeling. He had stepped into others' shoes before with varying degrees of success.
Taking over from Jim Carrey on the Bruce Almighty sequel, Evan Almighty hadn't worked out for the best. But being cast in the Ricky Gervais role in the
American version of The Office was arguably the making of him, as much as his roles in big screen hits like The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Little Miss Sunshine.
And these latest second-hand shoes he was stepping into came with some dangers. There was a phone in one of them, for one thing.
Or there used to be when Don Adams played Maxwell Smart in the gadget-happy classic 60s spy sitcom Get Smart.
Carell's Max shares a few traits with Adams' original. But no, he says, even off screen he can't do a good impersonation of Adams' famously adenoidal voice.
"No. You know what? I haven't even tried. I didn't watch a lot of the original series in preparation for that reason. I didn't want to be inclined to do an impersonation."
Today Carell is sitting on a luxury launch slowly circling a lagoon on Australia's Gold Coast where local and New Zealand entertainment media have gathered to see the film and grab quick interviews with its stars and director.
Also on deck is co-star Anne Hathaway, who plays Agent 99 in what for her is a movie of firsts - first gun, first movie co-starring not one but two ex-wrestlers (that's Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson and Dalip "The Great Khali Singh"), first grown-up comedy and guy flick.
"It's my first kind of male comedy - and everything that that implies. As much fun as the tiara flicks are, it's good to diversify."
Oh, and it's her first movie out since breaking up with infamous "international financier" boyfriend Raffaello Follieri - which isn't up for discussion today, we're told.
But, with her porcelain doll looks even more pronounced in person than on screen, the 25-year-old looks happy enough as another journalist is wheeled before her like some sort of speed-dating ritual.
Being Downunder, she says, has allowed her to assess how far she has come in her short, but impressive, career which has taken just under 10 years to get from teen television series Get Real to high-flying action comedy Get Smart.
"My last time in Australia was when I was 18 years old promoting The Princess Diaries and I haven't been back since. I was thinking last night about how different things are, how far my life has come and in some ways how exactly the same it is."
Her first film job, which predated her Princess Diaries breakthrough, was on the South Pacific Mormon missionary film Other Side of Heaven opposite Ugly Betty's Christopher Gorham, which was largely shot in New Zealand.
"I was in Auckland for three weeks and I had just graduated from high school. I had a blast. It was my first time out of the country and I only worked about seven or eight days so I just kind of explored Ponsonby Rd and tried to get out and see the beaches. It was my first film, so I was just trying to stay out of everybody's way and not embarrass myself too badly."
In taking on Agent 99, she says she knew she was up for inevitable comparisons with the original show's Barbara Feldon, a woman with a memorable purr of a voice, a fantastic wardrobe and, like The Avengers' Mrs Peel, the subject of many a boyhood crush.
"A lot of people, when I told them the movie I was doing, were very excited because they were huge fans of the original series and they kept asking 'are you going to have this? Are you going to say that? Are you going to wear that?'
"And I realised what the series means for so many people. It was great to have a partner in crime with Steve - we were each stepping into some legendary, very beloved shoes with our respective characters and we both decided we weren't going to do imitations, we were going to lovingly reference our characters but also make them our own."
Of course, Carell's been there before.
"I keep likening it to doing The Office. It was essentially the same thing - people loved the British version of The Office. Ricky Gervais' David Brent was and is this iconic character and I think most people were very dubious about our chances of achieving any sort of success. So the odds were definitely against us but I think in both cases we decided 'let's take the template and do the best we can with it'," he says.
So far, it seems to be working. With an estimated budget of US$80 million ($105 million), Get Smart is on its way to a profitable life, having opened with a healthy US$39 million and the number one slot in the US box office.
Having suffered through the experience of that Almighty flop, Carell might allow himself a little relief. But no.
"I am always a happy man. I have a very charmed life I have a great wife and two kids so being in a movie that does well is very nice. But at the end of my life I am not going to look back and say 'hey, we were number one'."
Get Smart director Peter Segal, a veteran of many Adam Sandler comedies, is happy to be a little more triumphant, especially as it opened on the same week as Mike Myers' alleged comedy comeback The Love Guru, which now seems headed to box office oblivion.
"It's unfortunate when you have two incredibly popular comic actors who have a movie opening the same day. And so that's why we were nervous, and we we very pleased to see the results."
It helps that though Carell is a certified star - a man often referred to to as "the funniest man in America" - his pay rate hasn't quite caught up.
"This film probably cost less than all three Adam Sandler movies I did," says Segal. "At the moment Steve doesn't get quite paid as much as Adam, so that is one of the helpful factors."
Segal had turned down Get Smart twice, feeling there wasn't anyone right for Max. But then, propelled by his roles on The Daily Show, Anchor Man and then the chest-hair-ripping breakthrough of The 40-Year-Virgin, Carell's name was put forward.
Segal was in and the movie was a go - after the director, Carell, and its writers could find a tone they were happy with, the remake project having already created a teetering pile of draft scripts.
Carell suggested they somehow reference the satirical edge of the old series but set it in the contemporary world of the Bourne films.
His other idea was to have Max not yet a fully fledged agent but a middle-aged backroom research boffin hankering all his life for action in the field.
So this Maxwell Smart isn't quite as dumb as some might remember him.
But then again, Segal says, he had a conversation with Mel Brooks, one of the show's originators who said the quintessential Max was really the one he and Buck Henry created for the show's pilot episode.
"He said Max was smarter there. He was understated. He got a little broader towards the latter two seasons. I said 'great, we are going to go back to that Max'. And that is why Steve plays a little more buttoned-down, a little more restrained. The only instruction I gave to everyone was 'don't act like you are in a comedy, act like you are in a drama and it will be funnier'."
Segal says there had to be a lot of choices made. They had to pick one bad guy, there was a trade-off between Agents 13 and 44. But some things they just had to have.
"I decided to put in the shoe phone. We put in the doors exactly - except we high-teched them up a little bit and literally studied the number of footsteps it took for Max to get from the bottom of the stairs all the way to the phone booth."
The Original Show
Created by Mel Brooks and Buck Henry in 1965, Get Smart ran for five seasons of 138 episodes - and for many years of repeats all over the world. It starred Don Adams as CONTROL Agent 86, Maxwell Smart who is partnered with Agent 99 (played by Barbara Feldon) as they battle with the forces of KAOS in a loose parody of the Bond films and the paranoia of the Cold War era.
Adams, who might also be remembered for reviving his character for a series of Toyota New Zealand in the late 80s, died in 2005.
A typical exchange from one of the episodes ...
Agent 99: Oh Max, you're so brave. You're going to get a medal for this.
Maxwell Smart: There's something more important than medals, 99.
Agent 99: What?
Maxwell Smart: It's after six. I get overtime.
LOWDOWN
What: Get Smart, the movie
Starring: Steve Carell, Anne Hathaway, Dwayne Johnson, Alan Arkin, Terence Stamp
When & where: At cinemas from July 10
