While the big Hollywood chatter is about the potential of director and frequent Ryan Reynolds collaborator Shawn Levy joining the MCU party for Deadpool 3, The Adam Project is his latest gig and once again the GFFA casts a big shadow, influencing a key sequence Levy describes as the ‘Star Wars Endor‘ sequence.
Adam Reed (Ryan Reynolds), a pilot from the year 2050, travels to the past where he and his wife, Laura (Zoe Saldana), a fellow pilot, are forced to flee the soldiers hunting them down. They speed down a heavily wooded trail in a truck with armored Stormtrooper-looking pursuers flying hoverboards on their tail. And… oh! Adam’s younger self (Walker Scobell) is in the back seat.
It’s a scene that pays homage to Star Wars: Return of the Jedi when Mark Hamill’s Luke Skywalker and Carrie Fisher’s Leia Organa are chasing after troopers on speeder bikes on the wooded planet Endor.
“I remember being so wowed by that sequence through the woods [in Star Wars], and we had this chase scene,” Levy says during EW’s Around the Table installment with the cast of The Adam Project. “It was supposed to just be a truck and a spaceship, and it wasn’t interesting enough.”
Levy remembers the film’s stunt coordinator finding a clip on YouTube of guys riding what he calls “hoverboard surfboards at high speed.”
“I said, ‘Can we actually do that for real?’ And we did!” Levy adds.
The filmmaker’s happiest memory of shooting that sequence is of Reynolds, Saldana, and Scobell shooting their parts on a green-screen set. “I remember being on a microphone and, because we needed to simulate the turns, I’d go ‘3, 2, 1, left!’ And no one knew if it was my left or your left,” Levy recalls.
“I didn’t want to go the wrong way,” Reynolds says. “Physics: just out the window.”
This isn’t the only nod to Star Wars in The Adam Project. Adam’s chief weapon is an electric staff young Adam can’t help but call a lightsaber. The film further feels like a combination of everything Levy loves, from the golden age of Steven Spielberg Amblin movies to classic sci-fi flicks.
“There’s a mixture of spectacle and fantasy and comedy and, above all, heart,” the director says. “I was in Los Angeles with Ryan a couple weeks ago finishing the movie, and when the movie ended, I said, ‘This is exactly the movie I’ve been waiting to make.’ Something that takes all of those influences and all those sensibilities and is just about audience delight and, hopefully, human connection. It’s probably been as satisfying an experience I’ve ever had.”
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