The final installment of the outtakes from this week’s interview with Footloose filmmaker Craig Brewer will throw together a few stray bits about the movie itself:
On Approaching it Like a Revival:
I always tell people the biggest risk I ever took with Footloose was taking it seriously. But at the same time, I tell people, it’s also Footloose, we’re going to put some cheese on the screen. I saw it in 1984 in a theater and when Kevin Bacon started doing the angry dance there were some chuckles there too. But that’s Footloose. I tried to approach it as more of a theater revival rather than act like I was rethinking the whole ting. No, I’m doing Footloose.
I remember being in high school and people wanting to put on The Breakfast Club as their school play. I felt like that on Footloose. So, I decided to change a couple of structural things and make this dialogue a little bit more me. But, how am I going to do the “Let’s Hear it For the Boy” montage? How am I going to do the angry dance? It’s Footloose, I can’t not do those. To some extent it challenged me creatively. This is a popcorn movie, We want to be entertained. But I just chose not to focus my lens on the ultra-cheesy. What I remembered most from Footloose was this argument between Ariel and her father where she said, “I’m not even a virgin”
