‘Deadpool & Wolverine’ Director Shawn Levy: Hollywood’s PG Guy Finds His Edge

Shawn Levy has long chafed at the labels Hollywood has placed upon him.

That helps explain the evolution of the Montreal-born filmmaker from go-to family comedy guy (Night at the Museum and Cheaper by the Dozen) to the producer of cerebral Oscar winners (Arrival) and cultural behemoths (Stranger Things).

After a string of successes in the aughts, Levy branched out with the 2011 Amblin-esque feature Real Steel, which earned nearly $300 million globally and showed he could bring his trademark emotionality to the action sphere. It also teamed him with Hugh Jackman, who, like others who have worked with the producer-director, says he creates an empathetic environment on set. “There isn’t one scene that necessarily was ‘the moment we clicked,’ ” Jackman recalls. “It was more a feeling on Real Steel that it made me know this was going to be a lifelong friendship.” 

After the death of his Museum star Robin Williams and the failure of his drama This Is Where I Leave You, both in 2014, Levy, 55, reassessed how he saw himself and how he wanted to be seen. He put the focus on his company, Stranger Things producer 21 Laps, whom he runs with partners Dan Cohen and Dan Levine, decided to start saying no. “I passed on a lot of movies that were very obvious Shawn Levy type movies,” he says. Instead, he went on to direct Ryan Reynolds hits Free Guy (which pushed his box office tally to $2.7 billion as a director) and The Adam Project.

Marvel’s Deadpool & Wolverine (July 26) marks the next stage in his evolution. R-rated and bloody, it’s the most non-Levy Levy movie ever — yet it has a beating heart underneath. Has the filmmaker finally found a way to be the nice guy with feelings, yet still jump from genre to genre and color outside the lines? Levy thinks so. “I’m not chasing anything anymore,” says the filmmaker.

You were once an actor, with small roles on 21 Jump Street and Thirtysomething. At what point did you realize that the acting thing was not for you?

When I was at Yale, I did a lot of plays with Paul Giamatti, who was a classmate. We did One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in our freshman year. I remember at 18 years old being mid-performance, watching my scene partner Paul Giamatti and thinking to myself, “Oh man, this is what greatness looks like. I’m not that.” That was the first seed. The other seed was when I moved out to L.A., and it was the waiting rooms. I’m sitting in a room with about a dozen different versions of myself, frequently including Paul Rudd, who almost always got the part. And years later, I closed the karmic circle by hiring Paul in Night at the Museum and I told him when he showed up to shoot, “I am a director because of the waiting rooms that I occupied with you.”

At 23, you left acting and went to USC film school to get your masters. What was that experience like?

This is early and mid-’90s. Everyone was making Tarantino knockoffs. Dark, violent, edgy stuff. And I made a thesis movie that was a warmhearted comedy about two 13-year-olds who get married to get into the Guinness Book of World Records. All my classmates mocked me for doing something that was “soft” and “sweet,” but when all those student films screened at the USC First Look Festival, I had a career the next morning. I had 47 voicemails before lunch, and it was the beginning of something I’m still riding out.

What was the transition from school to the real world like?

I got a lot of television work, directing for Disney Channel, Nickelodeon. Transitioning to movies, that was the break I had to wait for and work for. I’m indebted to Brian Robbins, who was producing a family film called Big Fat Liar. He called me up and he said, “This is the call.” And I said, “What call?” He goes, “The call you’ve been waiting for. This is it. I have a movie, I want you to direct it.” I remember asking, “Why me?” And he said, “Because your episode of our Nickelodeon show Cousin Skeeter is the one we remembered out of several dozen.” That was my break. And frankly, I went on a run of successive hits that I foolishly didn’t appreciate because I was, like, 30 years old and I didn’t know better.

You had a nice run of big studio comedies that were quite successful.

I’ve been lucky that I’ve had a few repeat collaborators who shaped me forever after. The first was Steve Martin, two movies [Cheaper by the Dozen, Pink Panther], then it was three [Night at the Museum] movies with Ben Stiller, two movies with Tina Fey [Date Night, This Is Where I Leave You], and now three movies with Ryan Reynolds. I love a creative synergy with a fellow artist. It makes me better, and as that trust develops, there’s a freedom that leads to better work, I think.

How do you develop that trust?

Unlike some directors, who live behind the monitor and operate from a cerebral place, I operate in my life and in my work from a pretty emotional place. My thoughts and feelings are on the outside of my skin. I find that with actors, who tend to live similarly in an emotionally available place, those connections happen pretty easily. They know I’m going to look after them in the edit room. An actor, if they don’t trust a director, is going to give you several takes that are relatively safe and same. But if they know that they can trust you to hunt for the good stuff and use the good stuff, they’re willing to try more.

When you were doing your family movies, Judd Apatow and Todd Phillips were making the quote-unquote “cool comedies” and you’re doing Cheaper by the Dozen. How did that make you feel?

There were times when I resisted the “family comedy” label, but I remember that after Night at the Museum made so much money, I was talking to Chris Columbus, who was one of my producers, and he was asking what I was going to do next and I was talking about doing something edgy and darker. And he said to me, “What are you doing?” And I said, “What do you mean?” He’s like, “Why are you running from the thing that you do better than most? You’re running from it because it comes naturally to you, but you should appreciate the superpowers that come naturally to you because not everyone can do that.”

Real Steel. Would you say that is the most important movie on your résumé?

It’s the most important movie on my résumé in terms of shifting perception of who I was as a director. It is still a Shawn Levy movie in that it is crowd-please-y and it is unabashedly emotional and warmhearted, and it’s about the redemption of relationships and the connections within family. But Real Steel is not a comedy. It has bigger, more muscular action. It has a completely different aesthetic look from all my prior movies, and it really freed me up to see if I had the different muscles I thought I might.

Real Steel was the first time you worked with Hugh Jackman. What do you remember of your first time meeting him?

I was in an airport. We’d never met, but I knew we had people like Tom Rothman in common because we both worked at Fox all the time. He was with his family and he was fretting because his phone was about to die. So I just went up to him, a stranger, and I said, “I have a phone charger, you want to borrow it?” And he was like, “Aren’t you …” I’m like, “Yeah. And you are. And yes, we know about 50 people in common.” I think it was at least a year, maybe two years before Real Steel. It was just literally an airport random meeting.

The Night at the Museum franchise was an original, homegrown franchise. Those movies were so huge, and your deal on that must have been amazing.

(Laughs.) I’m going to coyly say definitely, yes, because that was a different era. There was once upon a time a mystical thing called backend gross. We shall never see its kind again. But it was real. And for those of us who had flourishing careers in that era, things could work out really well. I had a decade of hits and my life was comfortable. I didn’t need to work from a place of supporting-my-family anxiety. But I did have this feeling of, “OK, so is that it? I’m going to be the guy who had a lot of hit family films, but what’s next?”

[Then came] Arrival and Stranger Things. Even though I didn’t direct those, a few things happened. For one thing, the disruption of the pigeonhole. It was so jarring to people that the Night at the Museum, Cheaper by the Dozen guy was producing Arrival and Stranger Things, but that disruption was the best thing that could have happened, because suddenly people were forced to reassess what I was about and what kinds of stories I might be able to tell.

How do you decide which episodes of Stranger Things to direct?

For season one, it was out of necessity. I just needed to buy the guys time. When that show blew up, the Duffers and I realized we share just enough superstition that we weren’t going to fuck with anything. So I became the episode three and four guy every year. I lucked out because traditionally episode four of Stranger Things is where we pivot into the batshit crazy.

It’s a massive show. On one side, you have the Duffers (brothers Matt and Ross, who created the series). You have Netflix on the other side. How do you manage the demands of the two sides?

I remember saying to the Duffers early on, “I don’t work in TV. I’m a movie director, but this thing is too good to not get made. So whatever you need, I’m going to be that guy.” And that’s still my North Star on Stranger Things. Sometimes what they need is for me to direct. Sometimes I’m doing shuttle diplomacy between the rigor and needs of the show and the pressures that we understandably have from Netflix. Whatever needs to get done to help our show be great, that’s what I do. And sometimes it’s been figuring out how to license “Thriller” for one of our trailers, a little pet project that I spent months on and only succeeded at two days before we showed that trailer at Comic-Con. It could be getting in touch with Tom Selleck to get permission to use a clip from Magnum, P.I.

How did Ryan Reynolds enter your life?

Ryan and I met maybe around 2017 to discuss a movie that we flirted with but didn’t end up making. We spent a little time working on something together, and then Ryan went off to make Deadpool 2. And then it was my daughter’s birthday, so I know the date. It was July 17, 2018. I get a text: “Hey, it’s Ryan, what are you up to? I think I found our movie.” It was Free Guy, a script that I had read maybe six months earlier and passed on because I didn’t really understand the gaming-centric storyline. But I was very interested in collaborating with Ryan, and we met the next day. And it was clear that neither one of us was a rabid gamer, but we both had a healthy respect for this big-idea hook. We started working on the script, and it was instant connection. We met at a point in our lives where we’d had separate success, and we were really ready to link arms. And not only was the filming fun, but we would take the train from New York to Boston together and sit side by side in a little train booth with a laptop between us, just banging out versions and revisions. And that’s when we realized, “Oh, it’s not just director, actor. It’s producer and producer. It’s writer and writer.” The same thing evolved on Adam Project and really came to its biggest fruition to date with Deadpool & Wolverine.

Is there ever going to be a Free Guy 2?

We’ve worked for two years on ideas and scripts. I’m less certain now, because, like Adam Project, we’re really proud of the movie and we don’t need to make sequels. If we don’t crack a story that feels very worth making, we’d rather just make a different movie.

How did you end up part of the Deadpool family? Because on paper, with the R rating and how the previous filmmakers were all edgy visual effects or action guys, you don’t fit the profile.

While we were making Adam Project, Ryan said to me, “I think I’m only going to do another Deadpool if you direct it.” And I remember standing on a massive, dark soundstage in Vancouver back in the era of masks and visors, one of those COVID shoots. He also said to me, “I know you’re going to say no, and I’m going to work on you until it becomes a yes.” Little did he know that I was already a huge Marvel fan, and I was a sick, massive Deadpool fan. I loved Deadpool long before I met Ryan Reynolds. And so the yes came quickly, and that was the beginning of a journey that took some very unexpected turns along the way.

The truth is, on paper, maybe it didn’t make sense, but my whole career has been devoted to subverting what makes sense on paper. I don’t want to do only one thing. I never wanted to be only one kind of director. And this has been maybe the most gratifying example of going this way when everyone thought I walked that way.

You were rumored to direct an Avengers movie, but the Russo Bros. are doing that now. Is more Marvel in your future?

What I will say is I absolutely foresee more collaborations between Marvel and me. The when and the what is yet to be seen. And contrary to so many assumptions out there, and even within myself before I had this experience, I’ve been arguably more creatively empowered and trusted on this movie than just about any other I’ve ever made.

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Shawn Levy’s 5 Secrets to Success

1. Don’t treat the studio like the enemy.

I’ve always treated the people who give me the money to do my dream job as worthy of partnership. I don’t lock the room and try to keep the studio out. I make it clear that I’m in charge, but I welcome them into the process because they hold the checkbook that made my dream come true.

2. Be nice.

I can name 15 examples off the top of my head of people who were assholes when they were on top. And when that wheel turns, when you’re no longer on top, if you treated people poorly when you were, nobody is going to hold the door open for you to get back in. 

3. You don’t know what’s around the corner.

In my 30s, I was the well-paid, commercially successful family comedy guy. And then in my 40s, things got more interesting because I was suddenly directing things like Real Steel and Date Night and The Internship. Now, in my 50s, I’ve gotten to make Free Guy and The Adam Project and All the Light We Cannot See and Deadpool & Wolverine. Don’t ever assume that what you’ve done is all that you’re going to get to do.

4. Be decisive. 

When you fail to be decisive, not only do you undermine the actor’s trust, but the crew starts to feel a power vacuum. And eventually lack of decisiveness leads to wasting time. And wasting time is disrespectful of the crew’s time.

5. This is an inherently emotional business. 

Whether it’s a company meeting with my staff at 21 Laps or my set with several hundred crewmembers, if you lead with feeling and enthusiasm and emotionality, I find it brings out the best in people.

This story first appeared in the July 22 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.