When Lonely Island veteran Akiva Schaffer took over The Naked Gun — and set out to prove, with his Liam Neeson-led reboot, that comedy can still thrive in theaters — he watched many films for inspiration. But one of the most important was the 1997 Pierce Brosnan James Bond movie Tomorrow Never Dies.

As Schaffer explained on the latest Lonely Island With Seth Meyers podcast, he watched countless action movies during the pandemic with longtime friend and fellow director Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, whose credits include Scream and Ready or Not. Some of the films they watched became visual reference points for the new comedy, out this week.

“You know what movie I kind of — not discovered, but that I realized was like the perfect sweet spot — was Tomorrow Never Dies,” Schaffer told fellow Lonely Island members Andy Samberg and Jorma Taccone.

“Me and Matt watched every James Bond movie in order, and when it got to Tomorrow Never Dies, it was like the old way jumped forward — it became a modern movie. Like even the surround sound on my TV came alive. And all those movies were shot on 35 millimeter, but before you could color time them in a computer and crush all the blacks, so the atmosphere is still there, but they’re gorgeously shot. They look amazing by today’s standards, but they also give you a hint of nostalgia.”

Tomorrow Never Dies had both the classic feel of the movies parodied in the original 1988 Naked Gun, but also the look of the more modern films that the new film parodies.

Original Naked Gun creators Jim Abrahams and brothers David and Jerry Zucker drew from the 1950s TV of their youth, as well as action movies of the 1970s and ’80s. One secret of their comedy — from Kentucky Fried Movie through Airplane! and Top Secret and The Naked Gun — was playing all the jokes straight, no matter how absurd.

In their 2023 book Surely You Can’t Be Serious: The True Story of Airplane!, Jerry Zucker explained that they spent hours watching self-serious TV programs like The Untouchables, Sea Hunt, and Mission: Impossible — “shows where the characters just took themselves so seriously, and we’d blurt out ridiculous lines for them to say.”

So when it came time to cast Airplane, Jerry Zucker added, “we actually got those same tough-guy actors to say the lines we always wished they would have said.”

They included Leslie Nielsen, who was best known for serious dramatic roles in films like The Poseidon Adventure before he lampooned disaster movies with Airplane, and went on to play the deadpan Lt. Frank Drebin in The Naked Gun and the 1982 TV series that preceded it, Police Squad!

Naked Gun Director Akiva Schaffer on How the James Bond Film Tomorrow Never Dies Influenced His Reboot

Schaffer’s work — including the underated 2016 Lonely Island movie PopStar: Never Stop Never Stopping, follows the same approach of playing everything sincerely. But his new film, arriving arriving 31 years after the sequel Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult, has three decades of new material to draw on, including Neeson’s Taken films and the John Wick saga.

Schaffer noted on the podcast the the Wick films, for example, are beautifully shot, but weren’t an ideal visual references point because they’re so dark. At the same time, he didn’t want his film to look like a generic brightly lit comedy.

“We don’t want it to look like just some sh—y over-lit comedy that has no point of view,” Schaffer explained.

He worked to achieve the right balance with cinematographer Brandon Trost, who also shot PopStar. He added that the film’s teaser, released earlier this year, quickly establishes how the new film is different from the old. The deadpan delivery and rapid-fire jokes are still there, but now in a more modern-looking way, reflective of the action movies that have come between the two films:

Schaffer also co-wrote the new film, in which Neeson plays the son of Nielsen’s Frank Drebin, with Dan Gregor and Doug Mand.

The Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker formula had a deep impact on The Lonely Island team, who recalled on the podcast how much their films opened their eyes to what movie comedies could do: Taccone noted, for example, that 1984’s Top Secret was the movie that made him realize adults could have as much fun as kids.

We agree: It’s on our list of the 12 Funniest Comedies We’ve Ever Seen.

Main image: Liam Neeson in The Naked Gun, directed by Akiva Schaffer. Paramount Pictures.