Why 'Another Simple Favor' director Paul Feig 'tried to kill' the sequel

AUSTIN, Texas – Paul Feig appeared a voguish cowboy at the world premiere of “Another Simple Favor” on Friday. His cowboy hat, cream jacket with fringe and matching boots were fitting, given the location of South by Southwest and the fact that the filmmaker had triumphed in a metaphorical gunslinging duel with his fears about making a follow-up to the 2018 original.

“There were a lot of times in the development of this I tried to kill it because I was just like, ‘If we don't get it right, let's not do it,’ ” Feig says on a lively patio at the Four Seasons during the festival. He pairs a cherry red Lucchese boot with a pinstripe suit for the occasion. “We actually had a script that was greenlit, and we threw 70% out of it" after reading online what people were looking forward to about the movie. “I'm not about fan service, but also I don't want to rug pull an audience.”

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In “A Simple Favor,” enthusiastic mommy vlogger Stephanie (Anna Kendrick) attempts to find her missing, enigmatic friend Emily (Blake Lively) only to learn Emily has faked her own death, which she tries to pin on her flailing husband Sean (Henry Golding). But Emily is arrested after Stephanie secretly records Emily’s confession for a livestream. Get your martinis ready to toast “Another Simple Favor” when it arrives on Amazon’s Prime Video May 1.

“There have been very few sequels I've seen where I've gone, ‘Oh, I'm so glad they made that,’ ” Feig says. “To do a sequel, do you deconstruct those people so they're having problems again? Will the audience not have patience for that? ‘I thought, we just repaired them in the first one? Why are they a mess again now?’ Or are you just going to take them into a situation as the characters we already know and then we're losing that fun of discovery of who they are.”

Feig needed to push his leads “out of their comfort zones.” Emily has strutted out of prison, likely in Christian Louboutins, thanks to high-powered attorneys. Which is great, considering she’s engaged to be married to the mysterious Dante (Michele Morrone) in a fabulous wedding in Capri, Italy. And she wants Stephanie to be her maid of honor. Golding returns for the sequel. Elizabeth Perkins replaces Jean Smart as Emily’s mother and Allison Janney plays Emily’s aunt.

“It's a new mystery of, ‘What's Emily up to?’ ” Feig says. “And I think that was the fun of this because Emily's such a good, slippery character that you never quite know what her motivations are.”

And Stephanie has more of a backbone this time around, at Kendrick’s urging. When Emily surprises Stephanie at a book signing, Feig envisioned a startled and nervous Stephanie. But Kendrick explained to Feig, “ ’I put her in jail already once,’ ” the filmmaker remembers. “I was like, ‘You know, you're right.’ And so we readjusted the script to give her that.”

Feig also welcomes the ideas Lively had about Emily, “probably my favorite character I've ever been fortunate enough to play," Lively said at Friday’s screening.

For Feig, Emily is “the perfect role” for Lively. “It's not who she is at all,” he says. “Blake is just the sweetest kind of Earth Mother. But she can snap into this character and just be so biting and asserting and scary, but funny at the same time.”

He remembers when they met for the first movie. “She's pitching me ideas, and I'm pitching back to her and together we take the character as we had written it originally, and then make it even better and more interesting and more three-dimensional,” Feig says. “But that’s what I do with all my actors. That's my process, no matter who I'm working with.

“The idea that movie stars show up to a movie and just go, ‘OK, I'm just going to do it the exact way you wrote it,’ there's not a movie star I've ever known or ever talked to who works that way,” Feig says. “Everybody collaborates.”

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Lively is currently involved in competing lawsuits with her “It Ends With Us” co-star and director Justin Baldoni. In one suit, Baldoni and co-defendants accuse Lively of "asserting control" over creative elements of the film.

It's not the case for Feig, who in January took to X to squash rumored tension between his co-stars.

“It's totally sexist, 100% sexist,” he tells USA TODAY. “When I was going to do ‘Bridesmaids,’ a male producer I know said, ‘Oh, boy, get ready. Six women in a cast. They’re going to be fighting.’ ”

Feig was befuddled. “Of course it was the greatest experience of my life,” he says. “Everybody got along so well. People try to invent this (expletive) when two women get together.”

Now that his worries about doing an “A Simple Favor” sequel have ridden off into the sunset, would he be game for saddling up for another? For “Bridesmaids,” perhaps? It’s up to star and co-writer Kristen Wiig, Feig says.

“I know it seems like it's easy,” he adds. “But that's the scary part.”

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Blake Lively's 'Another Simple Favor' nearly 'killed' by director