Tucked away near Lucille Ball’s former dressing room, nestled between soundstages on the Paramount lot is the office where John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein cook up many of their big-screen adventures. The pair, who write as well as direct most of their projects, share a desk, staring at each other and bantering as they fine-tune the witty dialogue and elaborate action sequences that have become their stock in trade in films like “Game Night” and “Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves.”
“When we’re not here, we’re on Zoom,” Goldstein said. “We talk to each other every day. We spend more time together than with our spouses.”
“It’s just one long conversation,” Daley added. “We go back and forth, coming up with what the characters are saying and doing, and then tweak as we go.”
It’s a blisteringly hot morning, roughly two weeks before “Mayday,” a big-budget action thriller with Ryan Reynolds as a fighter pilot who teams up with Kenneth Branagh’s ex-KGB agent after his plane goes down in Russia, debuts on Apple TV on September 4. It’s the first time that one of Daley and Goldstein’s projects has foregone a theatrical run, and that’s taken some getting used to, though it alleviates the pressure they would otherwise be feeling about how a thriller set in the Cold War would play with younger crowds who wouldn’t know their Glasnost from their Gorbachev.
“It’s definitely different to have something premiere on streaming,” Daley admitted. “The truth is that I don’t know if something like this would have worked commercially in theaters. It’s really hard to get an audience interested in a movie like this. So it gave us more freedom.”
Goldstein, who is sitting next to Daley on a massive couch, interjects. “It’s nice to not have to worry about the box office,” he added. “Opening weekends are scary.”
The two are already looking ahead to their next project, a reboot of “Star Trek” that will take Starfleet in a darker direction. They dish on how they plan to tackle the final frontier, as well as “Mayday’s” inspirations, turning Branagh into an unlikely action hero, and what it’s like to not only write, but direct as a duo.
The following interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
IndieWire: “Mayday” plays like a homage to the action films of the ’80s and ’90s. Was that your intention?
John Francis Daley: Not exactly. We were in post on “Dungeons & Dragons,” which was a very long process, and in the editing bay we started coming up with this idea of a sort of comedic “Misery” because we loved the sort of we loved the dynamic of someone being at the mercy of a sycophant without knowing fully their true intentions and the creepiness that comes with that. And then we thought, OK, how do we then build it out? And that’s when we thought of this Cold War backdrop.
Jonathan Goldstein: It was also on the heels of the success of “Top Gun: Maverick,” and we knew that there was this real appetite for iconic figures in American film — these heroic, patriotic characters. We weren’t going to spoof or take them down. We wanted to celebrate them, but also do it in a new light with a new approach.
Did you think about Ryan Reynolds and Kenneth Branagh early in the process?
Daley: We thought of Ryan early, because we knew it would be a tough sell to make a large-scale period action comedy that takes place in the Soviet Union. There were very few people that could get that movie made, and we had done a general meeting with Ryan and his people because he had expressed an interest in working with us after seeing “Game Night.” I had also known Ryan since I was 19 when I was an actor in the movie “Waiting” with him, and we had kept in touch. And we always knew we wanted him to play opposite someone with true gravitas, someone that isn’t known as a comedic actor per se, but was a talented dramatic actor who can do comedy. Like case in point, Jesse Plemons in “Game Night.” And Kenneth was at the top of our list.
Did you write the character in Ryan’s voice?
Goldstein: It’s hard not to because it is such a distinctive voice.
Daley: Ryan was very involved from the inception phase, because this is his bread and butter doing these types of action comedies. He was very mindful of there being a consistency in his character and a real arc. That works for us because we have gotten into the process of making comedies in the same way that they were made in the early ’90s and before. In the aughts, there started to become this kind of pattern of comedies being super ad-libby, where you get the biggest comedy stars of the moment, put them together and let them riff. And while that is great in many ways, there has become some fatigue in that style of comedy. We focus on getting the script to a really solid place and then we have our actors come in and play.
Goldstein: It also allows us to be more planned and specific and ambitious in the visual style of the movie, because when you’re not exactly sure what your actor is going to do or where they’re going to go in the scene, it’s very difficult to plan your camera work and your blocking. And so we try to lock that in before we even get to the set. Obviously, if an actor has an idea, you’ll consider it and maybe make a change. But by and large, we show up with a very clear plan of how each scene is going to play.
The cinematography is very fluid and the action sequences have a real sense of geography, which I appreciated. Were there films that inspired you?
Daley: It was Steven Spielberg that got me into this business. He really opened my eyes to what movies could be and how they could be accessible to all audiences and yet still have this artfulness. That has carried over in our approach to blocking and camera work, and finding ways to avoid cutting if at all possible. And Barry Peterson, our DP, who’s been with us since the first movie we’ve made, is really good at understanding what we’re going for. We give a lot of archetypes of other films and looks that we want, and in this case we wanted our action to be not difficult to understand. We wanted it to play out in a lot of wide shots, which is tough for our stunt team, because you know a lot of the times you’re burying things in the cut. I always go back to Jackie Chan as well as like this sort of anchor for the type of action that I think we both like. And weirdly “Munich” was a reference in that it had a lot of inventive camera work.
Goldstein: We love when blocking informs the coverage or when someone steps into their close-up as opposed to cutting to a close-up. You know, Fred Astaire was the originator of this notion that you shoot from head to toe whenever you can, and that was for dance. This is for fights, but it’s kind of the same kind of thing. The more we can get back wide enough to see the whole thing play out, the more engrossing it becomes.
Daley: It’s also a testament to Brad Martin, our stunt coordinator, who understood the agenda that we had, which was that we wanted to find interesting ways of portraying action that hadn’t been done before. We have this KGB agent in Kenneth Branagh who is able to utilize anything around him in an almost MacGyver way, though we didn’t want it to become so far-fetched that it felt silly.
Goldstein: We write the action scenes and the fight scenes like we write a dialogue scene. We really try to think how can we incorporate the environment. So, for example, we have a bar fight with Ken. We knew there’d be a pool table in this bar. It’s like, what haven’t you seen? I haven’t seen somebody use the pool triangle. That’s a weird way to fight. So we used that.
Had Kenneth Branagh ever done stunts like this?
Goldstein: Not to this degree. He asked us, how should I prepare? And we suggested he come to the set in Montreal early and spend a week or two with the stunt people, as opposed to showing up on the day and just throwing him in. That gave us the opportunity to really use him for a great deal of the fights. Obviously, there was a stunt double, he’s over 60 years old, and we’re not going to jeopardize the man, but he was as gung-ho as you could hope. He’s a Shakespearean actor and there’s all those sword fights in those plays. So he was used to the physicality of theater.
Had Ryan and Kenneth met before?
Goldstein: Never, but they were fast friends. They bonded over football. Between them, they’ve made over 100 movies, and yet they both learn from one another. The way that Kenneth was looking at Ryan, it’s like, how does a movie star do these scenes? And Ryan was looking at Kenneth to see how he goes so in depth in the character. Their curiosity about each other elevated both of their performances.
From “Spider-Man: Homecoming” to “Dungeons and Dragons,” your work has a lot of action, but you seem equally interested in the build-up to that explosion of violence.
Daley: Playing with tension is part and parcel of the comedic muscle, where it’s all about the setup as much as it is the punchline, and that applies to drama and horror. That applies to action. That applies to pretty much every genre. We’ve become more in tune with like with what our with what our audience is feeling when they’re watching it. A lot of it is from test screenings. That’s where you learn to play the audience like a fiddle. The same thing that makes comedy work, the same thing that makes horror work is the element of surprise and foiling the audience’s expectation. That requires a pivot at some point. The first time that we really discovered the power of that was when we were writing “Spider-Man: Homecoming” with the scene where Peter Parker and the Vulture discover each other’s identity in the car. It’s not an action scene, but it’s one of our favorite scenes in the whole film because you’re waiting and waiting to see what happens and who’s going to break first.
How does it work practically to have two directors on one film?
Daley: The one thing that we have to do is be more prepared than other directors, just in terms of what we’re going to tell our actors, what we’re going to do with our camera. We have shot lists and storyboard everything so everyone knows what their marching orders are. We’ve been doing it for almost 20 years starting with writing and then directing, and you do kind of become one mind. When we’re conceiving of it on the page, we’re already imagining it on camera. It’s rare that we disagree about something that’s going on the set. We’ll disagree while we’re writing, but we’ve found a solution by the point the camera rolls.
How did you decide you wanted to direct as a duo?
Goldstein: We had found success with writing features together. And then New Line came to us with the opportunity to direct the “Vacation” movie we wrote, and it just flowed from there. And when something works, and I do believe that movie worked, you don’t want to mess with the formula.
How did you meet?
Goldstein: I was a writer on “The Geena Davis Show.” I’d been a lawyer. I quit. I came out here, got hired on TV comedies, and it was my third show. And John was an actor on it and he showed me these films he had made, and I was like, I’ve got to show you ones I made, and we started talking.
Daley: We wrote a pilot with the intention of me starring in it called “Honey Pot” about the son of a Hugh Hefner type living in a Playboy mansion who doesn’t want anything to do with the family business. Nothing came of it, but the process of it was fun enough that we then wrote “The $40,000 Man” on spec. Have you ever heard of that? It was about the guy that came before the $6 million man, and he was built on a budget.
Goldstein: It was a very broad comedy, the kind they don’t make now, and it got on the Blacklist, and New Line bought it, and Jim Carrey was attached, and it almost went, but it didn’t. But that got us in the door.
John you became famous starring on “Freaks and Geeks.” When you were acting, were you always shadowing the director?
Daley: Absolutely. I was 14 or 13, when I auditioned for and got “Freaks and Geeks,” and being on set of that show is what opened my eyes to the possibilities of this type of work. We had some of the best performers and filmmakers working on it. Mike White was a staff writer on the show. We had Bill Pope, an amazing cinematographer, who did the pilot, Jake Kasdan and Judd Apatow and Paul Feig were all there, so I was surrounded by all of these masters in their craft who were also finding their own voices at the same time. I couldn’t believe that something as good as that show could be made from the kind of scrappiness that was required to bring it together. And then I realized that show is truly one in a million, and a lot of the subsequent shows that I acted, I realized, OK, so that was an anomaly. But yeah, I never wanted to go back to my trailer. I was always asking questions.