Steve Martin Takes on a Classic

Millions of younger filmgoers remember The Pink Panther as a cute feline cartoon with a catchy theme song backing him up. But, before the cartoon show, there were these crazy 1960's movies starring Peter Sellers as Inspector Clouseau. The first was The Pink Panther which was a gorgeous pink diamond. In a revival of the movie franchise for modern audiences, filmmakers have cast multi-talented funnyman Steve Martin in the Clouseau role and Beyonce Knowles as his femme fatale. Martin also wrote the script!

You probably last saw Steve as the put-upon dad in the popular film Cheaper by the Dozen but the award-winning actor/writer has a long history of comic genius starting years ago with his characters on "Saturday Night Live" and the totally hilarious feature film The Jerk.

We caught up with Steve in Beverly Hills recently and asked what it was like to step into Sellers' shoes, write the script, create a crazy French accent and work with Beyonce.

TeenHollywood: How did you come up with that great accent?

Steve: I worked on it with a great accent coach named Jessica Drake and I just walked around for months and months before the movie started talking with my little accent and she taught me some nice rules, four or five rules and then it's all about making it funny too.

TeenHollywood: Did you find yourself using it in say...the supermarket?

Steve: I would find it coming out a bit like that sometimes, and of course the people that I know are sick of me. [In crazy French accent] 'What are you doing over there?' There was a lot of talking with the accent. My dog got the most punishment of all having to hear it.

TeenHollywood: Did you write that funny "I want to buy a hamburger" scene?

Steve: Yeah. That was one of the easiest scenes to write in the movie because once I had the idea I knew that all I had to type was 'I would like to buy a hamburger' over and over and over. And then it would either be funny later or it wouldn't, but it was only funny through delivery. Certainly not on the page. It just looked like, 'What?'

TeenHollywood: You are stepping into some big comedy shoes. How much of an inspiration was the Peter Sellers Clouseau character?

Steve: Well, certainly it's a total inspiration. He and [director] Blake Edwards created this character that turns out to me is playable, is actable by someone else. I didn't look at the movies again before I started because that would just be too much influence, but I noticed that in the first film, The Pink Panther, he was in it just a little bit and he was almost English. I think that he was just working it out, and then in the second film, Shot in the Dark, he was more French and in third film the accent got really silly. He was kind of all over the place with it. You could watch him learning in the films what the character was.

TeenHollywood: Did you ever meet Peter Sellers?

Steve: I did. I met him in 1980. I think that he said something really profound to me. I was in Hawaii and we were both promoting a film and I was coming off a sort of hot standup career, and you know the cycle of sort of criticism, discovery, enthusiasm, success, slaughter. Right? So I was coming off the sort of slaughter years of my standup career which I stopped in 1980 when I had just done The Jerk and it wasn't out. I was in Hawaii at a luau and it was at night and he came up to me and he was a god to me, and he said, 'I know you're under a lot of criticism right now, but I know what you're doing.' It was kind of breathtaking really. So I felt like there was like a little torch passed to me.

TeenHollywood: What does it take to get you into the skin of such a fun, silly role?

Steve: Well, that's what comedy really is. I mean, there's so many different kinds of comedy. There's silliness, and I think that this movie has it all in that there are verbal jokes. There are big jokes. There are little tiny jokes. There are jokes from character. There are impossible jokes. Things that could actually never happen in life and that's what I loved about the original 'Pink Panther' movies – it did it all. Usually you must start with the comedy and stick with that tone all the way, and I think that our movie is actually quite consistent in tone, but I don't know how you get from the tiniest little verbal joke to some falling out of a window joke and still have it feel coherent which it does to me.

TeenHollywood: When you were writing the script, did you think. 'no. That is just too dumb to do'?

Steve: [laughs] Almost nothing is too dumb. Some of it is dumb. For example, in Cheaper By The Dozen 2, the studio said, 'We want a food fight.' I said, 'Absolutely not.' You see that in every single movie, in everything. It's the dumbest comedy idea. But in this movie I like the physical scenes that are actually clever because I think that's what keeps a physical scene going – it's moving from one little place to another and it has a logic to it rather than just bumping your head.

TeenHollywood: Can you talk about Beyonce being cast as the femme fatale?

Steve: I think that was a director and studio decision. We knew that we wanted a diva. The role was written for a pop star and I think that there is a practical issue involved with her fame for a certain kind of audience. She has the number one record this week, and she also motivates Clouseau, and you know, I'm not in that world at all. I don't know the hit songs. I don't have time to know it. So I was just surprised – first, she was extremely professional. She's really good in the movie, she's beautiful in the movie. The singing is great, and she brings a younger demographic.

TeenHollywood: What were your impressions of her when you first met her?

Steve: Well, she was a little shy, but you'll find a lot of people with enormous talent are actually kind of shy and that's how they got the enormous talent. 'I'm not going to sit here in this corner. I'm going to stand up and sing.' And she had a very simple operation going. It wasn't eighty four members of an entourage or something, and she was totally professional and a sweetheart.

TeenHollywood: Did you go buy her albums afterwards?

Steve: I bought her albums before and I listened to them and thought that they were really good.

TeenHollywood: You worked with Queen Latifah in Bringing Down the House and she's a giant singing star as well.

Steve: Oh yeah, and both are delightful. Queen Latifah is a big personality, really fun. And it was really great to work with her. She has a true, lovely spirit.

TeenHollywood: When you were a little kid, why did you want to be a comedian?

Steve: As a kid I didn't have aspirations to be a big star. All I had aspirations to do was to do comedy in whatever form whether it was magic tricks at Disneyland or in a small little theater at Knotts Berry Farm, California. It was just to be onstage and there was absolutely no feeling that it could go far at all and as you get older, in my twenties I thought, 'Uh, I don't want to travel around the country for the rest of my life working night clubs.' So you start to think in a different way, but basically it was all about the fun of being onstage and 'Look at me' and imitating your heroes or people who made me love comedy, great comedians from Charlie Chaplin and Stan Laurel of 'Laurel and Hardy' to Jackie Gleason and Jerry Lewis.

TeenHollywood: How do you know that something you write is funny?

Steve: Well, the truth is that you don't know until you screen it because I've had jokes that I just loved greeted with utter silence and the opposite; jokes that I didn't know were jokes get huge laughs. Mostly you're in the middle. Mostly you can figure out that it's going to be funny one way or another, and sometimes you're cracking yourself up and no one understands it.

TeenHollywood: You're a big star. How do you stay grounded?

Steve: I've never had a problem with that. I feel lucky and I also feel smart. I'll tell you what it is – in comedy you're always one inch from failure and you cannot be arrogant because the moment that you're arrogant you are dead and you're going to get beat down and you get beat down enough already even as a successful comedian.

TeenHollywood: Why should filmgoers see this movie?

Steve: What I know about the movie right now is that all audiences are finding something adorable or funny. It's the kind of movie that hasn't been around for a while. It is essentially clean. It is essentially clever and I think that we like all [the actors] We like Kevin Kline. We like Jean Reno. We like Emily Mortimer and we like Beyonce and so they're some nice, happy people that you can watch. I think that it's a clever film.

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Lynn Barker is a Hollywood-based entertainment journalist and produced screenwriter.