Saturday Night director Jason Reitman on capturing the chaos of SNL

In 2008, on the heels of his Oscar-winning film Juno, director Jason Reitman got the chance to guest write for Saturday Night Live, which had been one of his two childhood dreams (the other was to become a film director).

His agent called SNL creator Lorne Michaels and Reitman got a week in the writers' room, including an office on the 17th floor of 30 Rockefeller Plaza. One of Reitman's sketches, "Death by Chocolate" (starring Ashton Kutcher as a human chocolate bar with a taste for murder), even made it on the air. It was during this week that the idea for his latest film, Saturday Night, dawned on him.

"I was on the floor of [Studio 8H] and listening to the countdown, and it was a level of adrenaline I've never felt in my life," Reitman tells Q's Tom Power. "I'm thinking, 'I want to capture this one day.'"

Saturday Night chronicles the chaotic 90 minutes prior to the very first broadcast of SNL on October 11, 1975. In his research for the film, Reitman, along with his writing partner Gil Kenan, interviewed "every living person" who had anything to do with opening night, from the actors to the writers to the art department.

"We are taking weeks of people's memories and boiling them down into 90 minutes," Reitman explains. "So there are events that happened in the weeks before and weeks after, and we've boiled them down into one 90-minute experience because what we really want you to do is just feel what it was like to be there."

The focal point of Saturday Night is a 29-year-old Michaels, played by Gabriel Labelle. In 1975, Reitman says Michaels represented an entire generation of young people who felt unseen. His vision was to shake up network television by shining a light on a new kind of humour and talent that had never been seen before. "It's pure exhilaration, but it's also that moment that one generation rips TV out of the hands of another generation," Reitman says.

The director emphasizes how revolutionary SNL was for its time, and how impressive it still is today.

"We open the movie with a real quote from Lorne, which is, 'The show doesn't go on because it's ready; the show goes on because it's 11:30,'" Reitman says.

"High school plays get more time to rehearse. Summer camp talent shows have more time to prepare. You write the sketch Tuesday, you table read Wednesday and then Thursday, Friday, Saturday you build a sketch from the ground up. I mean, they build the sets, they paint them, they make the costumes, they figure out the wigs, they rehearse them, they get them ready for camera….  It's a roller-coaster. As you walk up to the roller-coaster, you can see there's a loop, there's a corkscrew, there's a huge fall. It doesn't matter. It's going to be a roller-coaster. You got to just buckle up."

The full interview with Jason Reitman is available on our YouTube channel and on our podcast, Q with Tom Power. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Interview with Jason Reitman produced by Lise Hosein.