Few filmmakers have made as much a mark on the popular cinema of the past thirty years as director Rob Reiner has done with his ’80s classics like This Is Spinal Tap, The Princess Bride and When Harry Met Sally, three movies that have been incredibly influential on many movies made in the decades since.
Romantic films have certainly been one of Reiner’s fortes as he proved when he directed Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan in When Harry Met Sally and Bruce Willis and Michelle Pfeiffer in The Story of Us. In his new movie, And So It Goes, he returns to that familiar territory by bringing together Michael Douglas and Diane Keaton, two Oscar-winning actors who have never appeared on screen together.
Douglas plays Oren Little, a crotchety realtor and a widower who is spending his time relaxing at his beachside four-plex where he terrorizes his tenants, including Diane Keaton’s lounge singer Leah Kaufman. At the same time, Oren’s son Luke is being sent to jail on a technicality so he asks his estranged father to take care of his 9-year-old daughter Sarah (Sterling Jerins).
ComingSoon.net had a rare chance to sit down with Reiner to talk about his latest movie and in the video interview below, you can hear him talking about how the initial idea for the movie came about and how it brought him together with Douglas and Keaton, who he feels were the only actors who could play the parts. He also talks about taking on a role for himself in the movie and casting some of the others in the movie, and we eventually get around to talking about the legacy he’s created with movies like This Is Spinal Tap and others. (In fact, after we stopped rolling video, we continued to talk with Reiner about the legacy of “Spinal Tap” and how many musicians worship the film unsure whether “to laugh or cry” after watching it, as well as how it has influenced bands like Anvil, whose doc Anvil! The Story of Anvil sometimes feels like “Spinal Tap.”) Reiner also talked briefly about some of the new television projects he’s been developing, which you can hear about below.
And So It Goes opens on Friday across the country.
