RDEAL

The creative force behind Real Steel, The Adam Project and Stranger Things, Shawn Levy is in a career purple patch right now. Busy receiving calls from Kathleen Kennedy as well as a prestigious film award, he’s taking a tonal stepchange with his latest project, a period adaptation of Pulitzer Prize-winner All the Light We Cannot See. The prolific director/ producer tells Total Film how saying ‘no’ transformed his career and why he takes nothing for granted…

The current strike situation has put everyone on pause. For Shawn Levy, it has meant downing tools on his biggest gig to date, Deadpool 3, and taking an extended break from working with his besties, Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman. He may be itching to get back to it (more of which later) but at least he’s not having to maintain muscle mass as he waits for a resolution. ‘I feel bad that Hugh and Ryan have to keep eating obscene amounts of protein,’ he laughs when we connect in his home base of New York in late August. ‘For me, it’s impatience and a certain agita, the waiting. But for them, it’s still, you know, boiled chicken 17 times a day…’

Still, the time off has given this self-confessed ‘optimistic pragmatist’ time to pause, ‘zoom out’ and appraise his work to date, especially as he’s being awarded the inaugural Norman Jewison Career Achievement Award at the Toronto International Film Festival in September. With his filming postponed, Levy, a native Canuck, can really relish the experience with his family at the ceremony and fully appreciate how far he’s come. ‘I grew up in Montreal. The world where movies and TV shows were made seemed like another planet. I was drawn to it. I knew I wanted to be a part of it. But I certainly didn’t know anyone who did it. And I didn’t know whether I would get to do it,’ he recalls. ‘I’ve two huge debts owed to my parents. The first is that they never once, at any age, said a single discouraging word about my pursuit of this dream. But they also taught me in all activities and in all pursuits: what’s the next step? So figuring out the next step has always been the way I break down daunting enterprises. I’m making Deadpool now. It’s a huge Marvel movie co-starring Wolverine, and if I look at the totality of it, it might be intimidating. So I just figure out: “What’s the next shot? What’s the next joke? What’s the next moment in the scene?”’

Levy’s next (completed) step is directing a sumptuous four-part limited Netflix series, All the Light We Cannot See, based on Anthony Doerr’s 2014 novel charting the World War Two tribulations of a young French woman, Marie-Laure, who is blind and searching for her missing father (Mark Ruffalo) via radio broadcasts she transmits from Saint-Malo. Her tale intersects with an SS radio operator, Werner (Louis Hofmann), who fights against the Nazi rhetoric he’s been forced to adopt. Co-starring Hugh Laurie and featuring a cursed diamond and the Battle of Saint-Malo, All the Light We Cannot See celebrates human spirit in the face of darkest hours. Having read the book and loved it, Levy was dismayed to learn Scott Rudin had the rights when he investigated adapting it under his production shingle, 21 Laps. As though it was meant to be, the rights became available again a few years later and Levy ‘pounced’. ‘I said to Anthony Doerr, “I know I’m not the obvious guy on paper, but we don’t live on paper. The filmmaker that I think I can be, isn’t entirely expressed yet in the filmmaker I’ve been.”’

‘THIS POST-2015 STAGE OF MY LIFE AND CAREER IS ONE IN WHICH I FEEL MYSELF GROWING, AND INSPIRED IN A DEEP WAY’

SHAWN LEVY

Initially intending to produce the series and direct an episode or two (as he does with each season of his exec-produced mega hit Stranger Things), Levy decided to go all-in and direct the whole show – agenuine step-change in tone and material from a filmmaker who had, at that point, excelled in crowd-pleasing action and comedy. It’s a tale Levy considers essential. ‘I think that the theme of tenacious hopefulness that moved me in 2014 when I read the book feels even more resonant to me now in the world of 2023, which is arguably as polarised and fraught as any time in recent history. And the need for that tenacious humanism is more urgent than ever.’

Name-checking Peter Weir and his Real Steel producer Steven Spielberg as touchstones for the new tone he wanted to explore (‘Filmmakers whose eclecticism I have aspired to: consistency of humanism, but eclectic genre’), Levy put out a global open casting call to find an actor to embody the peppy, brave Marie-Laure and discovered a PhD candidate and Fulbright Scholar grad student in Pennsylvania who is blind herself and had never acted before – Aria Mia Loberti. ‘She had to learn every single thing about how to do this job while doing this job in front of hundreds of people,’ Levy marvels of Loberti’s steep learning curve while filming in Budapest and on location in Saint-Malo. ‘But, day by day, [it was] an education for her about how to act, how to be on a set. And for me, through Aria’s experience, I reconnected with what I do for a living.’

NO WAY

A passionate talker whose rapid-fire observations are a mirror of his compatriot, mate and recurring star, Ryan Reynolds, Levy doesn’t seem to dance with jadedness. ‘I bounce to set still, every day,’ he nods. ‘I’ve always loved the job since I made my first student film, and I still love the job just as much. I approach my job the same exact way, whether it is an episode of Nickelodeon comedy from earlier in my career, or Deadpool, the biggest movie of my career. The way I approach the job is with enthusiasm, always.’ But the 55-year-old admits that at the point Anthony Doerr was publishing his novel that would become a ‘creatively fulfilling experience’ for Levy, the filmmaker decided to actively change his career. It wasn’t the first time he’d switched it up. Having aspired to acting, while attending Yale with Paul Giamatti, Levy had realised during a scene playing opposite his undergraduate classmate as 19-year-olds in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest that he couldn’t measure up to Giamatti’s talent. ‘I vividly remember thinking, “Oh, that’s what great looks like. I should go find what I might be great at.” And that was the beginning of the directing seed.’ By senior year, Levy was directing Giamatti in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and had found his calling, taking him on a path as a ‘family comedy guy’ until he yearned for expansion.

‘I made a conscious decision in late 2014 to start saying “no” more often,’ he admits. ‘I think I made nine or 10 movies in a decade, and most of them were hits, so I got the luxury of making another. I was knocked back on my heels by the loss of Robin [Williams, the star of his Night at the Museum franchise]… and I started saying “no”. I took a breath. And fascinatingly, in that moment, came Arrival, Stranger Things, Free Guy, The Adam Project, All the Light We Cannot See, Deadpool, maybe Star Wars next. This post-2015 stage of my life and career is one in which I feel myself growing, and inspired in a deep way that is new for me.’

Let’s unpack that slate ahead then. Stranger Things S5 is incoming and promises to be bigger and bolder than ever before, though no secrets are being spilled. ‘There’s no way to be contiguous with Season 4, and not, frankly, expand scale and depth,’ Levy teases. ‘It’s major, major, cinematic storytelling that happens to be called a TV series. Stranger Things 5 is as big as any of the biggest movies that we see.’

When he can get back to his UK set of Deadpool with his chicken-scarfing buddies, the helmer will be getting stuck into a fitting threequel for the merc with the mouth. Wincing at the mention of spoilery pap shots that emerged during filming showing a return of a yellow-suited Wolverine and a destroyed 20th Century Fox logo, Levy picks his words carefully, but his enthusiasm isn’t tempered. ‘It bums me out that photos have leaked online. But this is the price we pay for committing to real locations. I made a decision very early in prep that even though Deadpool is now in the MCU, I didn’t want another Marvel movie shot on a green screen stage with digital set extensions. And Deadpool and Wolverine are iconic Marvel characters; more specifically, iconic Marvel-of-the-Fox-era characters. We’re not going to pretend: “Oh, we snap our fingers, and suddenly that Fox legacy doesn’t exist, and it shaped a lot of what we now know as the MCU.” Fox also shaped Ryan’s career, Hugh’s career and my career. So there’s a lot of history there, and there’s a lot of Marvel history at Fox. And certainly that’s a part of our storytelling.’

Also part of his storytelling is a Real Steel TV show in development with Disney+ and the possibility of travelling to a galaxy far, far away – aprospect Levy calls a ‘bucket-list thing’. ‘Getting that call was a great day,’ he laughs. ‘I was in the edit room on All the Light We Cannot See, and I look at my phone, and it’s [Lucasfilm president] Kathy Kennedy. Thus began a conversation that led to her inviting me in to develop and make my Star Wars movie. I’m putting everything I have into it, because I love that world, and it is a privilege to get to join that galaxy.’ He’s practically giddy with the stories he gets to tell these days (‘Middle age isn’t a blast. But you do get good at your job!’ he chuckles) but even with his kid-in-acandy shop opportunities, Levy is still employing a judicious use of the turn-down.

‘With Deadpool, Star Wars and All the Light We Cannot See, there’s no headline goal left on the board,’ he confesses. ‘And I don’t say that without profound appreciation and thrill. So now, I think my new guiding principle is: I’ll only say yes when I can’t resist it.’ That could, he says, be a drama, sci-fi, period or comedy – but the connective tissue between all of his work remains the same. ‘I don’t know how to make something that’s not emotional. It’s one of the things I now see that unifies my work. I live with a lot of heart on my sleeve, and so do the stories I tell.’

ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE STREAMS ON NETFLIX FROM 2 NOVEMBER.