Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1546154
ver the course of a three-decade career, the prolific and versatile director, producer, writer and choreog- rapher Adam Shankman has helmed hit musicals (Hairspray, Rock of Ages and Disenchanted), rom-coms (The Wedding Planner, What Men Want), coming-of- age dramas (A Walk to Remember) and action comedies (The Pacifier). With his new film Stop! That! Train!, Shankman adds another genre to his resume — the comedy/disaster caper. Starring RuPaul, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Nicole Richie, Raven-Symoné, Joel McHale, Charo and Lisa Rinna, along- side a bunch of RuPaul's Drag Race stars, the comedy is set on a high-speed train travelling non-stop from Florida to Los Angeles. When a catastrophic "Stormaganza" threatens to derail the train and crash it, two stewardesses join forces with U.S. President Gagwell (played by RuPaul) and a cast of wild characters to save the day. Shankman assembled a creative team that included cinematographer Luka Bazeli and editor Joshua Kirchmer. Here, in an exclusive interview with Post (while still deep in post), he talks about the challenges involved and his love of edit- ing and post production. What sort of film did you set out to make? "A film in the grand tradition of come- dies like The Naked Gun and Airplane!. A satiric, joke-to-joke, send-up disaster movie. I wanted to just make people laugh. That's it." What did prep entail, and what were the main technical challenges? "I did most of my prep while I was still in post on my next film, The Man with the Bag. I did about two weeks of prep, just talking to the designers that I hired, as this movie had insanely-limited resourc- es. It's the lowest-budget movie I've ever made, so you get very crafty about how you're doing everything. And I did cast- ing from New York while I was finishing up that movie, and then I got on a plane and was pretty much shooting this two weeks later, so it was really fast. And the main technical challenges of pulling this whole thing together as quickly as we did all came back to our limited resourc- es. You're trying to create the sense that there were multiple cars of the train, so we had an enormous amount of green- screen work on-set, and then a lot of visual effects in post. And on top of that, we also had the technical challenge of lighting and filming all the drag queens, as you have to shoot drag queens dif- ferently than you shoot other people. You have to know exactly how to use the frontal lighting in order to keep the illusion alive, because they're not played as drag queens." So, you didn't make it easy for yourself? "No, it was insane. And I was working with a group of people who I'd never worked with before because of the budget restrictions, so I was counting on them all doing high-level work at that low-budget level. And it was an interesting exercise, as I also had a huge cast that took a lot of wrangling and a lot of love. But I had a lot of people who just wanted to be a part of it, and I'd say nearly all of the casting was done just with phone calls and me saying, 'Hey, would you do this?' It was an unusual way to do it, but for me, it was the only way it was going to work." Tell us about the shoot. "We shot nearly all of it on a bunch of stages over in Pacoima, in the valley in LA. We had one stage that was just the one train car that was built and then redressed a number of times in order to look like multiple cars. And that was quite complex, as the first class and the coach car are completely different looks. Then we built the cockpit and our Oval Office set on a tiny stage that was almost like a photography stage. And the only location we used was Union Station in downtown Los Angeles, which we dressed to also play the station in Florida, and we also used a bar set there. And then for the train headquarters office and the press conference scene, we used our production design office upstairs from the stage." What were the biggest challenges of the shoot? "Having just 19 days of shooting for an incredibly-ambitious movie and shooting as many pages as we did in a day. The scheduling and logistics were insane. Just getting all the main characters, let alone all the cameos in and out — usually in just half a day, as very few of them worked more than that. It was crazy, but we never went over. There was no overtime, as we were not allowed to do overtime." So, you prepped and shot in record time. How long did you have for post? "We've had longer, because we were locked into a release date, but it's still been relatively short. The original sched- ule had my legal cut, but I knew that I was going to need more time with all the visual effects, so I had to lock the cut early, in about six weeks, and then we just started plowing forward. We're still getting the visual effect shots in, be- cause virtually every shot in the movie is a visual effects shot. I've had more visual effects shots in this tiny movie than I've had in any other movie I've made." Do you like the whole post process? "I love post. It'd be different if I was mak- ing a big studio movie, but it's scrappy on this and I wear a lot of hats, and I also know what I'm doing and what I'm getting into with these things. And prior to me even directing and producing, I'd been a part of making so many different kinds of movies at so many different budget levels, and so much TV that none of it feels cra- zy to me. My attitude in post is, 'Okay, this is what this requires, and this is how we're going to do it.' I'm using Company 3, who are old friends and who I've used a lot, and they're working with us on all the col- ADAM SHANKMAN - STOP! THAT! TRAIN! SHOOTING A COMEDY/ DISASTER CAPER IN JUST 19 DAYS O DIRECTOR'S CHAIR www.postmagazine.com 8 POST JULY/AUG 2026 BY IAIN BLAIR Director Shankman