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Stop! That! Train! opens nationwide on June 12th, 2026 via Bleecker Street. NYC MOVIE GURU: What do you think are the basic elements that turn a comedy into a classic? Adam Shankman: The discovery and the repeat watchings. That would be the mark of something becoming actually more of the classic vein. You can never predict that. If it's a comedy, you hope that people will laugh. It's all in the roll of the dice. This movie is very layered in terms of the stack of jokes, so you're definitely going to miss things on the first watch. There's a lot of stuff that happens in the background in this movie that you'll have missed on the first watch. Hopefully, if people are laughing in the first watch, they'll return to it and start to see more and more things. It actually took me a couple of months to fully digest it all. While I was editing, I saw things that I hadn't even noticed that were happening in the background---like some of the characters were doing things that were hilarious that were not in the foreground of the shot. Then I would notice them, and I was like, "Oh, yea. We've got to keep that because they're insane. Look at how crazy they're acting!" NYC MOVIE GURU: Among all of the genres of cinema, do you think comedy is most subjective? AS: It's 100% the most subjective. Everybody has a different sense of humor. That's why I think that movies like this actually work in a different way than other more intellectual comedies because it's leaning into silliness, stupidity and physical humor. It doesn't really require a lot of point of view and thinking. You think that something is funny just because it's funny as opposed to considering the comedic point of view. If you have to explain it, it's probably not that funny. When you find yourself explaining jokes, you've probably missed the mark completely. NYC MOVIE GURU: Do you ever have a gut feeling of which scenes will be remembered the most from your films? AS: I think that every time you know what that scene is going to be, you're wrong. My favorite scenes in almost everything that I've ever worked on were always very different from what people would think my favorite scenes are. My favorite scenes are the small scenes---the quiet scenes, the intimate scenes, the more out-of-character scenes---where something came out of an actor that's more nuanced and delicate. I think a lot of big, broad comedies involve that. It's when something is delicate that I really see beauty. I'm kind of proud of that, quite frankly. In this movie, I don't know what jokes people are going to take from it. I have no idea, actually, because a joke is going to play better for one person than another person. It's fun to see people discovering new jokes, also. It's such a joke-dense movie, that I have no idea what jokes people are going to laugh about. NYC MOVIE GURU: How do you feel about Hitchcock's observation that logic is dull and that imagination is more important. Do you agree with him? AS: We ended up putting more logic in than had originally existed because our financiers kept asking this question about a certain piece of logic, and I kept on going, "Does it even matter? We're really late in the game." They were like, "How exactly does the train stop?" It was never in the script, exactly, how the train stops. So, we, sort of, wedged that in at the very end after shooting it. We never really paid any attention to logic. There's no logic to the fact that the storm seems to be following the train. [laughs] And no one seems to care about the towns that it's potentially wiping out. And what exactly is going to happen to the train? We don't pay attention to that in this movie. We just set up theoretical stakes and dramatic moments for people to react to. NYC MOVIE GURU: How challenging is it to capture campiness? How would you define campiness? AS: People have postulated about that forever. Campiness is just an exaggeration. It's an exaggeration for the purpose of, generally, comedic provocation. I basically said to everyone, "Look, the jokes are the jokes in the movie, but none of these characters know that they're in a comedy. This is actually a drama for all of you. Yes, we're going to escalate things to a soap operatic level in terms of performance. If you guys start performing theatrically to the back of the house, none of this is going to be funny anymore. It's not going to work." So, camp, for me, is once you've established a certain kind of a tone and a world that the characters live in, it works best when there's just consistency to that tone and then a little bit extra of people having exaggerated reaction to things. NYC MOVIE GURU: How important is it for a movie to have a plot if, ultimately, most people forget the details of the plot afterward? AS: If you don't have a plot, then the audience will leave the movie and check out because they become confused. Whenever you're watching a movie, the plot has to be there to thread it all together, theoretically. If you're confused, then you're not paying attention to jokes. You can laugh at a plot twist or a moment when the plot is abandoned, but you have to have a plot there and work it out. I would say that the plot in Airplane! is about as loose as our movie. It's very simple just as it is in this one. And there's just things that if you sat and thought about it, it won't make sense, but the plot is very clear in this movie. I also anchored this one in a different way than Airplane!: I anchored it in a friendship story. This actually has a little bit more heart than a traditional satirical disaster movie parody. NYC MOVIE GURU: What was the process like to come up with the title Stop! That! Train! and its exclamation points? AS: There was a lot of discussion about the title. It always felt like we were all on board with harkening back to the old 70s disaster movies. That's the DNA that we share and the tradition that we were following. There were so many titles that we were throwing around. I remember saying, like, as a joke, "Let's call it Stop That Train. That's what the movie's about." I wasn't being overly serious. I was so frustrated with all of the many titles that were being thrown around. So, then I left and came back upstairs to the producers office, and Tom Campbell, one of the producers, had said, "What do you think of this?" and he had put the exclamation points behind each word, and said, "I know that this sounds crazy, but I think that this might be funny." I looked at it and said, "Are you being serious?" And he said, "Yeah.", and I said "If you guys think that it's funny, then I'm down. It's ridiculous, but I'm fine with it." NYC MOVIE GURU: Which film do you think would pair well with Stop! That! Train! in a double feature? AS: Beach Blanket Bingo. Main Page Interviews Menu Alphabetical Menu Chronological Menu ______________________________________________________ |
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