Taglines: Boys will be boys… some longer than others.
Five men who were best friends when they were young kids are getting together for the Fourth of July weekend to meet each others’ families for the first time. Picking up where they left off, they discover why growing older doesn’t mean growing up.
Adam Sandler, Kevin James, Chris Rock, David Spade, and Rob Schneider head up an all-star comedy cast in Grown Ups, the story of five childhood friends who reunite thirty years later to meet each others’ families for the first time. When their beloved former basketball coach dies, they return to their home town to spend the summer at the lake house where they celebrated their championship years earlier.
Sandler came up with the idea of a guy who feels like he and his family have lost their perspective of what’s important in life. So, when he unexpectedly has to go back to his home town, he decides to use it as an opportunity to get back to his roots and get his family on the right track. To do this, he rents a lake house and invites his old friends and their families to come and stay with them for the Fourth of July weekend.
“The whole project was really appealing,” says director Dennis Dugan. “These real-life friends get together for a summer to make a movie about friends who get together for a summer at a lake house. It’s a bittersweet reunion, because their coach has died, but they’re also happy to see each other. They’re meeting each other’s families – it’s them and their wives and girlfriends and kids and dogs – at a moment when they’re all transitioning in their lives.”
The underlying sweetness to the story proved to be the key in bringing the all-star talent together. “It’s a really, really good script that Adam wrote with Fred Wolf,” says Rob Schneider. “It’s very funny and it has interesting characters. Dennis really encouraged us to make it real – get out there, play around with it, and make it a natural performance.”
As Maya Rudolph puts it, “There are a lot of funny people in this movie, but it’s not just a lot of funny people in this movie. It’s a movie about old friends played by people who really are old friends. You can see that history come out in the relationships.”
Once Sandler and Fred Wolf finished the script, it wasn’t hard to get everyone on board. “Adam’s whole idea was that everyone would bring their families and we’d all have a nice summer at the lake house,” remembers Dugan. “It was one of the best summers of my life. Because everyone knew everyone else so well, it was like going to a really great party. Adam really wanted that kind of atmosphere to come across in the movie.”
“Adam created something special for all of us,” notes Salma Hayek. “All of our children are about the same age, and mostly girls, and they all bonded immediately. It was really a family environment – it was perfect.”
“We wanted the whole movie to have a nostalgic feel and element to it,” says the production designer, Perry Andelin Blake. “Everything harks back to a simpler time. The movie really is about getting back to family, roots, and being together with people.”
So the real-life chemistry between the actors would translate seamlessly to the characters they play on screen. In fact, many of the stars of Grown Ups have known each other for years. Rock says, “Most of the guys met at ‘Saturday Night Live.’ I met Adam doing stand-up 20 years ago easily at Comic Strip in New York. We just hit it off when we were the younger funnier guys in the club. Spade I met at ‘SNL.’ Schneider I met at ‘SNL.’”
“When the ‘SNL’ stories came out, I’d just see Kevin sort of fading away,” laughs Schneider. “Honestly, though, it seemed like Kevin is cut from the same cloth. Having done stand-up comedy and surviving, he gets it.”
“If you hang around comics or comic actors a lot, you sometimes see really competitive guys: ‘oh, he just told a joke and now I’ve got to tell a better joke,’” says Dugan. “But this set was really relaxed – partly, I think, because Adam brought everybody together. Everybody came in with a great attitude – ‘Let’s just start riffing and see how much fun we can have.”
About the Lake House and the Production Design
From the beginning, it was important to the filmmakers to shoot Grown Ups on location, outdoors, at a real house on a real east coast lake. Production designer Perry Andelin Blake describes the appeal: “We really wanted it to feel real and to get the flavor of what the lake looks like when the sun is shining on the water. Being on a lake, being outside, it makes for the nice changes of mood – the light and background changes, depending on the time of day. We really took advantage – at the end of the day, the sun that would be streaming through the windows, or in the mornings, you could see the light shimmering on the water. When we’re inside the house, you can see the real lake, not a blue screen lake or backdrop. It makes the whole set feel more alive.”
Still, the filmmakers would have to choose their location carefully. A film production is an enormous undertaking – not just metaphorically speaking. The square footage required is immense. To shoot in a real-world location for an entire summer could have been highly inconveniencing for the people who live there.
So, in January, 2009, Blake and director Dennis Dugan went on the search for the perfect east coast location. Blake says, “This movie takes place in summer, but we were scouting in winter. We were looking at frozen lakes and woods with leafless trees.”
They finally settled on a 25-acre chunk of land in Essex, Massachusetts. “We got lucky with the town of Essex,” says Dugan. “The town owns a peninsula on Lake Chebacco. We rented it from them and basically made it into a back lot.”
The little house in Essex sat on a hill overlooking the lake in a way that the filmmakers found extremely appealing; coupled with the large space, it was the perfect location. However, the house itself would need a lot of work – it had once served as a rec center, but was no longer in use and showed it. “It was in pretty sad shape. It was all closed up and had been broken up into a bunch of little rooms,” says Blake.
So the filmmakers began the work of transforming the location into the perfect lake house. “We took the old house and gutted it,” says Blake. “It had a low ceiling, which we opened up and put in rafters. We were able to make a big room where we could have a sense of the controlled chaos that occurs whenever several families get together. That was the most important thing; we needed a place where all of our characters could interact and flow around – the great room that everybody hangs out in.”
The filmmakers also put in a new entryway with a new front door and added a bathroom to the property, and these changes remained for the local citizens to enjoy. “We put in old wood and made it to look like it was an 80- or 90-year-old house,” Blake adds. “It’s exciting to know that after we left, it’s still a rec center for kids. We really did strive to leave the place better than when we got there.”
The film production did make a few more additions to the building that were movie sets only. This includes the back wing, which wraps around a tree. “This big tree was five feet back from the old building,” says Blake. “Obviously, we weren’t going to cut down the tree. So we left it there in the center of the house. We worked our stairway right around it – there was even a branch coming off of it that we turned into one of the handrails. It really makes the house a unique piece of architecture – it was cool to do something that unusual. You look at the house from the outside and there it is, a living tree, growing right out the roof of the house.
Grown Ups (2010)
Directed by Dennis Dugan
Oyuncular Adam Sandler, Kevin James, Chris Rock, David Spade, Rob Schneider, Salma Hayek, Maria Bello, Maya Rudolph, Di Quon, Joyce Van Patten, Ebony Jo-Ann, Steve Buscemi, Madison Riley
Senaryo: Adam Sandler, Fred Wolf
Production Design byı Perry Andelin Blake
Cinematography by: Theo Van De Sante
Film Editing by Tom Costain
Costume Design by: Ellen Lutter
Set Decoration by Claire Kaufman
Art Direction by: Alan Au
Music by: Rupert Gregson-Williams
Distributed by: Columbia Pictures
Release Date: June 26, 2010
