Director Paul Feig on the ‘Fucked Up’ Burden of ‘Bridesmaids,’ 10 Years Later
Ten years after “Bridesmaids” became a massive hit, director Paul Feig looks back on how they pulled it off and what it meant for the future of female-led comedies.
Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast/Getty
Exactly a decade after Bridesmaids hit theaters and smashed records, director Paul Feig joins The Last Laugh podcast to look back on how it all came together so perfectly.
Feig goes deep on the whole process, from how he escaped from “movie jail” to land the gig to discovering the power of Melissa McCarthy during the audition process. There are behind-the-scenes stories from the movie’s funniest sequences. And he opens up about the pressure he and collaborators Kristen Wiig, Annie Mumolo and Judd Apatow felt to deliver a hit that would somehow prove the value of female-led comedies—a burden he says should never have been placed on their shoulders.
“The industry was really looking at this movie to see if it would work,” Feig explains. “A lot of female writer friends of mine were out pitching similar kind of female-led comedies, and they were all told, ‘Look, we’ve got to wait and see how Bridesmaids does,’ which is so fucked up. The fact that the industry says we’ve got to wait for this one movie before we can let ladies star in a film. So we were fighting that weird, antiquated thinking.”
Once the film was a huge hit, he adds, “It was this nice feeling of like, OK, now the studios see that movies starring women can make money. There is an audience for these, which again, it’s so ridiculous that we had to prove that, but you know what? We did.”
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