Adam Sandler: The Blackbird Spyplane Interview
Adam Sandler: The Blackbird Spyplane Interview
The Sandman comes through talking about his excellent new special, the joys of enormous shorts, Happy Gilmore 2, and more unbeatable topics
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Today we’ve got a truly momentous guest: the one and only Adam Sandler, who hates doing print interviews, has done like 3 of them since 1996, but made a blessed exception for Blackbird Spyplane. I (Jonah) have loved this man’s work since I was a Young Plane. I sneaked out of my bedroom on Saturday nights to watch him play Opera Man on SNL. I listened to his early comedy CDs on repeat. I watched cult classics like Billy Madison and Happy Gilmore so many times on VHS I learned them by heart.
In the decades since, Adam’s movies have continued to give me joy. I admire his diehard, unpretentious dedication to kindvibed absurdity, sublime dumbness, and primal ridiculousness. And I admire how he’s able to switch things up with seeming ease and give complex performances in auteurist dramas like Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love, Noah Baumbach’s The Meyerowitz Stories and Josh & Benny Safdie’s Uncut Gems.
Adam just wrapped a second Baumbach movie, with George Clooney, and he’s about to start shooting Happy Gilmore 2, 28 years after the original came out. In the meantime, his new stand-up special, Love You, is out on Netflix today — Josh Safdie directed it, and it’s great.
It all adds up to a singular career that we’re honoring with the first-ever Blackbird Spyplane Critics Circle Jury Prize for Lifetime Artistic Excellence.
On top of that? Adam has turned wearing gargantuan basketball shorts into an art form in its own right — and as much as I love pants, I gotta respect how much he hates wearing them.
All of which means I was in Hog Heaven the other day when Adam hit the Spyphone to talk about making the new special feel just the right amount of f**ked up; why he’s put out movies nonstop for 30 years instead of chilling out and doing nothing; a traumatic Bar Mitzvah suit that sparked his lifelong aversion to tight clothes; and more “unbeatable topics.”
Blackbird Spyplane: I’m not gonna spoil anything, but you guys do something in Love You that I’ve never seen in a comedy special before, which is create this sense that things are on the fritz: The venue’s weird, it feels like the whole show might fall apart at at any moment, there’s festering low-level chaos in the room you’ve got to roll with. Where did that idea come from?
Adam Sandler: “I was on the road, we had a good show that we felt very proud of, and I said, ‘Maybe I should put this down as a special so I have it forever.’ I’m buddies with Josh Safdie, so I asked him, ‘Do you wanna direct this?’ I was doing some arenas at the time and I thought maybe he’d come and shoot at one of those, but he said, ‘You know, it’s fun to see you in a small place.’ And he wanted it to be different from my last special, 100% Fresh, so he kept sending me texts — ‘Maybe this, maybe that,’ ideas for different things being sprung on me, kind of showing what a comedian goes through when they show up to a gig and try to do the best they can with whatever’s being thrown at ‘em.
“In the beginning I was, like, ‘I don’t know, man, I’ve got the act pretty good, let me just do that.’ But Josh and Ronnie Bronstein were passionate about it, so I said, ‘Let’s give it a shot, I trust you, I love you, you guys are geniuses.’ And I’m very happy with it. There’s something exciting about watching somebody try to do what they came there to do, but s**t is in the way.”
Blackbird Spyplane: Where my mind goes is when a comedian’s just starting out doing stand-up and they have to play lots of really tough rooms. You might be doing a set at a bowling alley at 2 in the afternoon, nobody knows who you are, they’re bowling while you’re trying to tell jokes, and you have to work extra hard to win people over in this messy, uncontrollable situation. Whereas later in your career, you walk in and there’s all this love in the room from the jump. I wondered if part of it was that you miss that uphill battle.
Adam Sandler: “You know, it wasn’t something I was thinking about missing, but I do remember those days. The truth of it is, though, no matter how well the audience knows you, after a minute or two, you still gotta get cooking, or they’ll turn on you. It’s happened to me. Last summer I shot up to the Comic Strip at 10 o’clock one night for no reason. I had nothing to really give, I just said, ‘Let me get on stage, try out some jokes,’ I don’t even know what jokes I was thinking of. And I did not have the best time. The crowd was staring at me, like, ‘Why are you here? Why are you here if you’ve got nothing great to say?’
“So you get punched in the face, and you go, ‘Oh man, let me prepare a little more next time.’ But it’s good. In comedy, when you’re rolling, it’s the best feeling, but another great feeling is getting in a hole and then getting out of a hole — you go, ‘Holy s**t, that needed to happen. That was getting ugly.’”
Blackbird Spyplane: You’re about to start shooting a Happy Gilmore sequel. People get nervous about sequels when it’s a movie they really love, like this one — but the original came out in 1996, and I think when this much time has passed, it can become something else. I’m thinking of how Paul Reubens and Judd Apatow made that last Pee-wee Herman movie 31 years after Pee-wee’s Big Adventure. It was sweet and funny, but there was also something profound about seeing this character we first met as youthful, decades older. It added something deep.
Adam Sandler: “That made life a little easier when we were writing it. We were, like, ‘Let’s just accept that a lot of time has gone by, things happened in Happy’s life, and let’s just write about ‘em and come up with thoughts about what he’s feeling at this age.’ And it led to a lot of cool stuff.
“I was actually just at the office, we were jamming on ideas, and I really feel more excited about this one than I have in a long time. It’s feeling very funny, there’s a lot of jokes I’m excited to get out there, but also I’m just connecting with the feel of it. I’m writing the script with my buddy Tim Herlihy, we’re the same age, and there’s a lot of things we’re going through that we’re putting into the movie. It’s a comedy, the whole job is to make you laugh, and we wanna do that, but, yeah, it puts something extra on it.”
Blackbird Spyplane: Now what the Deep Cut Happy Madison heads wanna know is when Strange Wilderness 2 is coming — shout out to Steve Zahn.
Adam Sandler: “Ahaahaa I love that, man. I love that you like Strange Wilderness. That would be fantastic.”
Blackbird Spyplane: Correct my math, but you’ve averaged something like 1 movie a year for the last 30 years. Where does that drive come from? Is it you saying, “I have the funnest job in the world, I get together with my friends, we make each other laugh, why wouldn’t I do it as much as possible?” Is it, “I never know when they’re gonna take this all away so I’m not taking anything for granted?” Is it something else?
Adam Sandler: “It’s all of that. You never know when it’s going to stop. And also, making a movie takes so damn long that there’s ideas that come into your head while you’re making one movie, so you go, ‘All right, besides this movie I gotta get this other one done.’ If it’s good, I wanna get it out there.
“But I don’t know, we had this screening last night in New York, and it was an intimate hang, 200 people or something watching the special together, and I walked out going, ‘Man that felt nice,’ and it kind of knocked me out today. We were working on Happy Gilmore 2, and I was going, ‘S**t, I can’t believe we’re jumping in. Maybe I should just enjoy last night.’ And then a couple hours later I go, ‘Nah, let’s go, let’s f**king get to it.’ I like people being happy and having a good time. So it’s definitely an addiction, but it’s as rewarding as it could be.”
Blackbird Spyplane: I want to ask about your personal style. You tell a joke in the special about how you can’t discipline your kids with a belt because you only wear pants with elastic waists and drawstrings. At this point you’ve got something of a uniform that you locked into around 2000 — some would call it iconic, and I’d agree. Lots of big colorful hoodies and polos, enormous basketball shorts. There’s a sense that you’re having fun with clothes, as opposed to a guy who gets no pleasure from them.
Adam Sandler: “I’d say the most fun I have is when it fits. If I can get the pants on and not feel like the stomach is pressing on anything too much, I’m in a much better mood. And s**t, if the shirt feels soft enough, I’m happy. If I have to wear pants, I like when they’re not clinging to me too tight. I think it comes from wearing a bar mitzvah suit that was a little itchy. Ever since then, I’ve said, ‘Let me make sure I’m never feeling that again, let me keep it loose.’”
Blackbird Spyplane: So it’s comfort over everything.
Adam Sandler: “It’s all comfort, and then maybe the right color will make someone else happy.”
Blackbird Spyplane: All right, finally, I asked you to tell me about a cherished possession, and you chose a guitar your dad gave you. What’s the story?
Adam Sandler: “Yeah, it’s the guitar I sing the last song in the new special with. My dad got that guitar for me when I was really young. It’s a Fender Stratocaster, they call it some color I forget, it’s a weird name…”
Blackbird Spyplane: Guitar World calls it “Antigua” — it’s beautiful.
Adam Sandler: “I get a nice feeling taking it out of the case. I still remember the conversation I had with my dad about getting it for me. He told me I had to practice ‘Malagueña,’ and when I could play it note for note, he’d get me the guitar. I remember working my ass off, and playing it for him, and he finally said, ‘Yep, you got it, baby,’ and he went out and got me the guitar.
Blackbird Spyplane: He wasn’t a “stop that racket, get a job” kind of dad.
Adam Sandler: “No, he didn’t have that. He liked that I would sit in my room and jam. He actually played some chords and sang country tunes, Johnny Cash songs, ‘They Call the Wind Maria’ — he used to sing that from his room a lot. He was always cool about me being into this stuff. My whole family was.
“So when your father passes away and there’s something you get to see and hold that he gave you, that’s a good feeling. When I watched the special last night, it felt really good to see it. And I’ve been looking at that guitar since I was 12.”
Adam’s new special, Love You, directed by Josh Safdie, is out on Netflix today, and it’s fantastic. His last special, 100% Fresh, is a delight, too, and Paul Thomas Anderson shot some of it uncredited.
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Nice to see this, happy and humble.
Great work, Plane people. Best line…”as much as I love pants…”. The lead in can really go in any direction.