Year One opens this weekend providing a good opportunity to delve into this interview with screenwriter-director Harold Ramis. Evidently I’m a huge fan of Ramis because in little over a year, I’ve featured a bunch of his movies in Daily Dialogue including Animal House, Groundhog Day, Caddyshack, Meatballs, and Ghostbusters. That’s an impressive list of hits and there are more Ramis has been involved in including Stripes, Back to School, and Analyze This. Add to that Ramis’ stint in the TV series “Second City TV” and that is one impressive comedic resume. Here’s an excerpt from the interview in New York magazine:

The movie seems like it’s rooted in a much earlier comic tradition. There’s the Monty Python biblical comedy, and even some of the Bob Hope–Bing Crosby chemistry shared by Jack Black and Michael Cera.

The shorthand for what I was doing was that I would be doing for Genesis what Monty Python did for the Gospels. But they’re more conceptual. I don’t bring the conceptual frame in this film. The main conceit is having characters with contemporary consciousness in the ancient world. That’s something comedians have always played with, from Mel Brooks’s The 2000 Year Old Man to A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. I do have more references from the thirties, forties, and fifties than young people working today because they didn’t grow up with that stuff. Maybe everything I do is an attempt to be a Marx Brothers film or some kind of forced fantasy film. I have described this film as Hope and Crosby: Road to Sodom.

You may read the rest of the interview here.

UPDATE: This deal was announced yesterday: