Making a Fake Movie
Along with being an action, comedy, and romance, The Fall Guy is also a movie about the magic of making a film. Like The Artist, Be Kind Rewind, Adaptation, and many more before it, The Fall Guy takes us behind the curtain as we follow the crew on their quest to make Metalstorm. But the difference here is The Fall Guy wants us to feel like part of the below-the-line crew.
Who’s making that fictional film? That would be Jodie Moreno, Colt’s ex-girlfriend and a debut director who’s helming the special effects extravaganza known as Metalstorm. As fans of the original will know, in the TV series, Jodie was the hair and makeup artist, but it was McCormick who decided there was more to be explored by reimagining her as a director. Played by Emily Blunt, Jodie is a firecracker who’s also relatably terrified, exhausted, and stressed about her first big helming gig, and that’s before her ex shows up.
“I didn’t want her to be severe and tough and together,” Blunt says. “It’s okay for her to feel like she’s in way over her head. It’s okay that she’s white-knuckling it. And then, when Colt shows up, the thread breaks. I like that she’s just as messy and eccentric as the rest of them. We really worked hard on building those colors, so she wasn’t just some presupposed idea of what a female director should be.”
Like Gosling, Blunt was enchanted by the chance to make a love letter to making movies, which she has a deep passion for. “I love the system—obviously—of making films,” she laughs. “I think there’s a curiosity about how it’s done. And I think this is an opportunity for us to romanticize it and make a spectacle of it but also to show the reality and grind of what it really looks like when you’re making movies. The chaos, how everyone is held together with duct tape by the end of the movie. You get to see all those wonderful little nuances that ground it and romanticize it all the more at the same time.”
“So much of filmmaking is almost like what we’re doing right now,” Gosling says, referring to our interview. “It’s two people trying to have a conversation with all this chaos around them. At any given moment, there are people trying to have a conversation, whether it’s at craft services or on set, or it’s base camp, or it’s in front of the camera or behind the camera, and it’s just chaos around them. So it all had to center around that idea.”
Metalstorm is a big budget special effects-filled romp that follows a cosmic cowboy, played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s Tom Ryder, who falls in love with an intergalactic alien brought to life by Teresa Palmer. It’s an epic space opera that could make or break Jodie’s career, but Leitch uses it as a romantic reflection of the journey at the heart of The Fall Guy, something Gosling feels rings particularly true about filmmaking. “When you make a movie, the movie starts to mirror your life, and your life starts to mirror the movie. It’s very strange,” Gosling says.
