Chevy Chase told Jason Reitman he ‘should be embarrassed’ on Saturday night

On By Littum

Saturday evening filmmaker Jason Reitman received quite a critical review for his film from one of the originals SNL contributor.

During a recent episode of Fly on the wall podcastrevealed director Chevy Chase’s reaction to the film, beginning, “Chevy loves to say what you’re not supposed to say.” The film follows the chaotic 90 minutes leading up to the first broadcast of SNL in 1975.

“So Chevy comes in to see the movie and he’s there with (wife) Jayni and they’re watching the movie and he’s in the group and he comes up to me afterwards and he pats me on the back and goes, ‘Well , you should be embarrassed,” Reitman recalled to hosts David Spade and Dana Carvey.

As everyone bursts into laughter, Spade said, “You couldn’t even write it better.” Carvey added that Chase “knows it’s funny, like that’s the harshest thing you can say to a director at the moment, or right up there.”

Reitman explained that he was trying to rationalize Chase’s comments in the moment. “I try to balance it because in my head I know, ‘Okay, I’m going to have my own Chevy Chase moment that’s 1,000 percent just for me right now.’ And from a comedy standpoint, it’s really clean, and it’s kind of cool,” he said. “But also, I just spent two years of my life recreating this moment and trying to capture Chevy perfectly, and also in the ego , finding humanity and giving him a moment to be loved — no, none of that crap played. He doesn’t talk about that stuff.”

Saturday evening starring Cory Michael Smith as Chase, Gabriel LaBelle as Lorne Michaels, Rachel Sennott as Rosie Shuster, Dylan O’Brien as Dan Aykroyd, Ella Hunt as Gilda Radner, Lamorne Morris as Garrett Morris, Emily Fairn as Laraine Newman, Kaia Gerber as Jacqueline Carlin , Matt Wood as John Belushi, Kim Matula as Jane Curtin, Cooper Hoffman as Dick Ebersol, Nicholas Braun as Andy Kaufman/Jim Henson and Willem Dafoe as David Tebet.

Reitman said that when it came to casting each role, he “tried to identify one thing” about each character, and for Chase, it was “an ego that needs to be humbled.”