Director Adam Shankman is happy to be back in Toronto after a long time away, presenting his latest film STOP! THAT! TRAIN! at the opening night gala of the Inside Out 2SLGBTQ+ Film Festival. At one point in his directing career, Shankman spent several years living and working in Toronto, filming The Pacifier, Cheaper by the Dozen 2, and Hairspray back to back to back in and around the city. Itโs almost a bit of a homecoming.
His return to Toronto with his latest film marks another change of pace in the career of the veteran filmmaker and choreographer. Stop! That! Train! (which opens in theatres this weekend and has to be stylized in exactly! that! manner!) is a low budget, old school parody film that skewers disaster and action movie cliches, much in the same vein as Airplane! did nearly fifty years ago. Only this time, in addition to the requisite amount of big name cameos peppered throughout, the leading cast of this disaster-piece is comprised mostly of drag queens who cut their teeth on the iconic reality competition show RuPaulโs Drag Race.
Stop! That! Train! focuses on the exploits of two down on their luck train stewardesses, Tess, played by Ginger Minj, and DeeDee, played by Jujubee, who have been unceremoniously laid off by their budget carrier employer, Stank Rail. To keep from further falling into despair, the pair conspire to become new hires aboard the Glamazonian Express, an ultra-high speed rail option that only hires hotties. Tess and DeeDee get the cold shoulder at first from the trainโs resident diva stewardesses – Alli, Amber, and Ayshleiygh (Marcia Marcia Marcia, Brooke Lynn Hytes, and Symone, respectively) – but quickly prove useful(ish) when the train starts heading through an unprecedented Stormaganza and everyone on board faces certain danger. Meanwhile, the president (RuPaul) frets over what this disaster could mean for her tenuous polling numbers.
When I sat down to talk with Shankman on the morning of the filmโs gala screening in Toronto, he relished the chance to get as silly as humanly possible with this material. While he certainly understands camp appeal, he can only think of one other movie in his filmography that approaches this same degree of almost surreal silliness.
โI think the closest thing I’ve done to this is Hairspray,โ Shankman says when thinking about the tone of Stop! That! Train! โI donโt know how you wouldnโt classify that as bordering on parody, because it is. This kind of humour is really in my DNA, and it’s very much who I am. Itโs the closest to my actual sense of humour, and itโs why I did the movie. I was like, โGreat! Now I get to be stupid again!โ I don’t have to really worry about offending anybody, because we don’t go after anyone in the movie, and no groups are isolated. Itโs just straight up slapstick, old-fashioned. absurdist comedy, and that was a real opportunity I didn’t feel like missing.โ
But the nature of such a rapid fire parody did present one new challenge for the veteran comedy director, and that came in the form of realizing that some jokes could be missed because the audience is having too much of a good time.
โYou need to know what the balance is,โ he says about what he learned from leaning into parody. โSometimes you need a breath, and you need to give the audience a second to hear. I had an experience this week at the premiere in Los Angeles, where I realized that a third of the jokes were being missed because people were laughing so much, which is great, but I was surprised. Those jokes only missed because they didnโt have a moment to process them. They actually oftentimes miss the bigger joke, because the smaller joke that was setting up the bigger joke was so funny. It was interesting, but itโs great for people who love to rewatch. And I know I definitely buried a lot more of the inside jokes for rewatch purposes.โ
Stop! That! Train! is also an outlier in Shankmanโs career as of late because it was made on a shoestring budget and in a limited amount of time. After directing some of the biggest comedic blockbusters of the past couple decades, the limitations of Shankmanโs latest necessitated a lot of creative solutions and careful juggling.
โWe made the movie in 19 days for almost no money. That train was one rectangular wooden thing, and we just kept repainting and dressing it overnight to try to make the next day’s work, and it was really a wild ride. I mean, the train companyโs headquarters was our production office. The train headquarters in the movie was an office, so the office was an office. And then it also doubled as the Presidential press conference room. We just reset and draped it. So this movie was scrappy as hell, and I have all the praise in the world for everyone who helped to pull this off. I wasn’t trying to mask the 70s DIY kind of thing. In the movie Airplane!, they have a toy airplane just hanging around as a prop, so it’s like I went straight for that, too, and I was happy to do it. It felt like those movies helped give me permission to do that here.โ
โFor this movie, the biggest challenge was the green screen,โ Shankman says about how making the film look purposefully cheesy and silly created its own set of hurdles. โPart of the ethos is letting it everything look a little bit loosey-goosey, and purposefully looking not so great. But at the, at the same time, I didn’t want it to pull people out of the movie entirely, so I didn’t want that to become its own joke. There were times when that could have definitely happened, and if it looks too crazy, you arenโt focusing enough on the jokes and the people delivering them. And I think some people were very intimidated to be working with me because I had done so much studio work and here I am on this much smaller movie. The people that I was working with were all new to me, and I had never worked with any of them outside of some of the cast before. And they knew that I had a certain aesthetic that I was going for, and we were all working to achieve that.โ
Those new faces extend to the filmโs leading cast, made up primarily of stage and small screen performers whoโve never or rarely had a chance to shine this brightly and prominently on screen before. With the film produced in part by queer television pioneers World of Wonder, the company behind RuPaulโs Drag Race and numerous drag conventions tied to the series, Shankman had a large talent pool to pull from and examine before shooting.
โI cast a pretty wide net, but I was also a fan of Drag Race,โ Shankman beings when talking about the casting process. โSince the movie was produced by World of Wonder, there’s almost 700 girls that have appeared on that show, so it’s a big, big list. But there are certain drag artists that are simply just better actors, and so I heavily auditioned all of the performers. Everybody auditioned, and they got their jobs fair and square! And I knew that there was definitely a high degree of expectation that they felt, just because these artists do not get these kinds of opportunities all the time. They wanted to show up, and everybody was not just incredibly professional, but everybody was really bringing their A-game. It was really funny to watch how they all came together.โ
But despite working with an all new team of creatives and having a little amount of money to work with, Shankman was undeterred and undaunted throughout the filming of Stop! That! Train!
โDirecting is directing, honestly. If I’m going to put my faith in an actor and invite them to the party – and by the way, the party is something that I have to wear as a tattoo for the rest of my life – I’m not looking for the most difficult path. I’m going to cast the people who I think are best suited and seem like they’re going to be great in the role, and so when they get there and everybody shows up like they’re supposed to, it’s heaven.โ
One of Shankmanโs biggest hallmarks as a director is his ability to pull from his backgrounds as a competitive gymnast and dance choreographer. While he might be best known outside of directing for his dance work, including a prolonged stint as a judge and choreographer on So You Think You Can Dance, Shankman estimates that by this point he has spent just as much time working on the art of physical comedy.
โI feel like Iโve been choreographing slapstick as long as I’ve been choreographing dance. I had a long run of movies, where if you look at my IMDB, you might think โI donโt remember any dancing in that,โ because there wasn’t, and I was literally just there to help with building the physical elements of the characters with the actors. Physical comedy has always been my favourite. Iโm actually the worst, because I just want to throw myself around, because I’m a gymnast, and I always love to fall down. It endlessly makes me laugh. But at the same time, I would never make anyone do anything that I also couldnโt do myself. Like, it would never even occur to me. I remember a long time ago I was choreographing a big girls’ numbers a live tour, and the girls would be hemming and hawing about having to do some of the work in heels. And my first thought was to have a go of it myself in heels. So I’d get a pair of heels, and I would do the work, and if I couldn’t do it, then I wouldn’t make them do it.โ
While the film is releasing at the height of Pride season this summer and the film shines a spotlight on plenty of queer talents, Shankman hopes just as much that Stop! That! Train! is able to bring more comedies to the big screen instead of them going straight to streaming. This is a film thatโs made to be viewed with an audience, and Shankman hopes that it can follow in the footsteps of other recent parodies and comedies to show studio executives that these kinds of movies are viable theatrical releases.
โMovies like this, and Scary Movie, and Naked Gun from last year, are made to be watched in a large group. Last year, only eight comedies got proper wide theatrical releases. That number for horror movies and thrillers was around 45. So I hope people show up to watch it as a group because thatโs why we made it.โ
Stop! That! Train! is now playing in select theatres.
