“Saturday Night ”director Jason Reitman says Chevy Chase told him 'you should be embarrassed' of his “SNL” movie

Everyone's a critic — especially Saturday Night Live legend Chevy Chase. Just ask Jason Reitman.

The Saturday Night director has revealed Chase's brutal response after watching his intense 2024 drama detailing the 90 minutes leading up to the first-ever broadcast of SNL, and the actor, who was one of the original members of the 1975 SNL cast, certainly didn't mince words.

"Chevy loves to say the thing you're not supposed to say — to the extreme," Reitman told SNL alums David Space and Dana Carvey on the new episode of their Fly on the Wall podcast. "I have an example for you… So Chevy comes in to watch the movie, and he is there with [his wife] Jayni, and they watch the film, and he's in the group, and he comes up to me after, and he pats me on the shoulder and goes, 'Well, you should be embarrassed.'"

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Spade and Carvey immediately broke out into laughter.

"What an exact Chevy thing," Spade said. "You could't even write it better."

Carvey suggested that Chase was intentionally trying to make Reitman uncomfortable. "Well, he knows that's funny — like, that's the roughest thing you could say to a director in the moment, or right up there."

Reitman replied that, for the most part, he took the criticism in stride.

"I'm trying to balance it because, in my head, I know, 'Alright, I'm getting a Chevy Chase moment that's 1,000 percent only for me right now,'" Reitman recalled. “And from a comedy point of view that's really pure, and that's kind of cool. But also, I just spent, like, two years of my life recreating this moment and trying to capture Chevy perfectly, and — even in the ego — find the humanity and give him a moment to be loved. And no, none of that shit played. He's not talking about that stuff."

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Cory Michael Smith, who portrays Chase, one of the breakout stars from SNL's first season, recently told Entertainment Weekly that when it came to his performance, he largely relied on Reitman to be his "point person" and decided against meeting Chase.

"The big question that Jason had for me at the beginning was, 'How much insecurity are we going to see from Chevy?'" Smith recalled. "He wanted me to look at how he walked, and also wanted to focus on: 'How good of a liar is he?' For him, it was always calibrating the degree of confidence versus insecurity, because the Chevy we know is very confident, but this is before he had the approval of a massive audience.

Though Reitman didn't recall Chase offering any feedback on Smith's performance, he admitted that reactions to the movie's depiction of former cast members have been mixed.

"I've done two movies about real people, and this is what inevitably happens," Reitman said, referring to his 2018 political drama, The Front Runner. "You interview the original person. All they wanna know is who's gonna play them and if they're attractive and how tall they are. And then they watch the movie and they just can't figure it out. Like, there's just silence after."

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He added, "They're just freaked out by it. They're freaked out by watching themselves. It's emotional."

Of the comedians portrayed in Saturday Night, Reitman said, "Billy [Crystal] was really into it. Laraine [Newman] loved it. Garrett [Morris] loved it. I think for Garrett… Lamorne [Morris] did an extraordinary job as him."

Another SNL alum who wasn't afraid to share his opinion? Dan Aykroyd, portrayed by Dylan O'Brien in the movie.

"Cracking a head to applaud Jason Reitman's triumphant SNL film. Wow!,” Aykroyd wrote on social media in October. "What a propulsive, engaging, funny, beautifully cast and acted, suspenseful, adventurous, music-filled ride. A perfect window into the creative process at its highest level."

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