For editors Shane Reid and Darrin Roberts, shaping ‘John Candy: I Like Me’ meant looking beyond the beloved comedian’s screen persona and uncovering the deeply personal story behind the laughs.
“It was like we were learning about who this man was behind this giant figure that we’ve grown up with,” says Reid of what surprised him the most during the editing process.
“The surprising thing to me was how much he was going through that we would never have known if it wasn’t for the ability to go back in time like John’s son Chris says and be a detective of his own father’s life,” says Roberts.
Editors Shane Reid and Darrin Roberts discussed the collaborative process behind ‘John Candy: I Like Me,’ reflecting on their work with director Colin Hanks, producer Ryan Reynolds, and the Candy family to craft a portrait of the beloved comedian that extends beyond his filmography. The editors spoke about uncovering previously unknown aspects of Candy’s life through family interviews and archival materials, particularly the impact of childhood trauma and his efforts to break generational cycles. Reid and Roberts also detailed the evolving nature of documentary storytelling, the challenge of balancing humor with more emotional subject matter, and the importance of preserving the warmth audiences associate with Candy while revealing a deeper understanding of the man behind iconic films such as ‘Planes, Trains and Automobiles’ and ‘Uncle Buck.’
Directed by Colin Hanks and produced by a team that includes Ryan Reynolds, ‘John Candy: I Like Me’ charts Candy’s rise from his early days on ‘SCTV ‘in Canada to becoming a household name through blockbuster comedies like ‘Stripes;’ ‘Splash;’ ‘Spaceballs;’ and ‘Planes, Trains, and Automobiles.’ Alongside career highlights, the film offers rare glimpses behind the curtain, weaving in never-before-seen home movies and candid reflections from those closest to him. Friends, colleagues, and family all contribute, painting a vivid portrait of a man whose warmth and humor resonated far beyond the screen.
‘John Candy: I Like Me’ is currently streaming on Prime Video.
Awards Focus: It’s so nice to meet you today. How are you doing?
Shane Reid: Doing very well. Thank you. How are you doing?
AF: I’m doing well.
Darrin Roberts: Thanks for having us.
AF: How did you first become attached to working on ‘John Candy: I Like Me’?
Darrin Roberts: This is my third documentary with Colin Hanks. The first one we did in 2015 was the Tower Records documentary, ‘All Things Must Pass,’ and then we did a documentary about the Eagles of Death Metal for HBO. I had always been aware of this project from Sean Stuart, who’s the producer at Company Name. We’ve worked together many times. When the idea was floating around the office, I was definitely interested and told them, “Whenever you guys are ready to go, let’s do it.”
Shane Reid: Yeah, I came at a sort of midpoint of the film. A lot of the interviews had been conducted. We still had some more that we were picking up and just continuing to shape the film and discover with Darrin. I came in through my relationship with Maximum Effort, Ryan Reynolds, George Dewey, Johnny Pariseau, Ashley Fox, and them. I had done ‘Deadpool and Wolverine ‘with Ryan and had gotten close to him. This is a very near and dear project to his heart. I came in and was fortunate enough to meet Colin and Sean and the camp and Glen and Darrin and just helped take this movie to where it got to.
AF: Darrin, having worked with Colin previously, how has the shorthand improved in your relationship?
Darrin Roberts: It just keeps getting easier. I think that in the beginning with Tower, I was one of the first people to be interviewed for that movie with Sean Stuart. I had spoken to Colin in my interview that he was maybe a first-time doc director, but he’s a movie person. He understands story structure, act structure, and character arcs, and that there was a sense that for at least the Tower doc, that this would be like a movie and not so much like an academic or a retail lesson. It would be like entertainment. When we went to do ‘John Candy,’ it was already established that we knew these things. We just had to pave the road before we could really speed on it with Shane. The more we work together, the more understanding I have about what he wants from his movies and what he wants from the experience for the audience of his movies.
AF: I saw the film in Toronto and was very emotional, having grown up with a number of John Candy movies. What was something that surprised you during the process of editing the film?
Shane Reid: I didn’t know really a lot about John’s family. John was really alive in a time where we didn’t have the access that we have to celebrities. I think John represented this much larger than life character in my own life and my own forming as a child. But I realized as I got into the film, I didn’t know who his children were. I didn’t know much about his wife. I didn’t know much about his personal life. Instead of being in this time that we live in now where we have complete access to everything, it was like we were learning about who this man was behind this giant figure that we’ve grown up with.
I think all the little details within there were something that we were learning, which felt exciting for an audience to learn about. But really, it’s taking a peek behind the curtain of someone who’s a legend and very much our relationship with John was the movies. That’s mainly how most people knew him, unless you were maybe from Toronto and had more access to him. But that’s the way I always had him in my life.
Darrin Roberts: Yeah, basically, just to drill down a little further on what Shane is saying, I think what surprised me was a lot of the details that we got from the family, especially about John’s early childhood trauma, which, like what Shane said, that was not information that was available to really anybody. And so, to have that kind of intimacy, that’s just an example of all of the stuff that we learned from John’s family in conjunction with editing all of these archival interviews with him. All these appearances on talk shows or interviews, all of the clips from TV and movies, the way in which we can edit them all together and weave them into this story to me was a way to illuminate all these things that surprised me about what we didn’t know about his general psychology through his life and how that affected his decisions and how those decisions turned into the movies and the TV that we all know.
But yeah, the surprising thing to me was how much he was going through that we would never have known if it wasn’t for the ability to go back in time like John’s son Chris says and be a detective of his own father’s life. The last thing to me was also this idea from Chris and a little bit with Jen that there’s cyclical trauma, which isn’t a new idea, but the idea that John was trying to help break that trauma was also a very deep level of narrative that I found just very, very interesting and very surprising. It was rewarding to sort of illuminate that for the audience for me.
AF: Were you actively editing during the interview process or did you wait until all the footage was completed?
Shane Reid: It kind of happened in chunks. Darrin had more of a load of interviews up front. When I came in, there were still interviews that were sitting on the table. There had been the laying the path, and then there were a few more to sort of sprinkle in there. And then, all of a sudden came the third leg, which was really, I think, when you have a certain amount of interviews to work with and you start to present that cut to other people, you start to yearn for a deeper connection through those interviews and through those shared experiences.
What was very apparent about John was that everyone had different relationships with him. Some of his Second City family who are the closest to him might have only known John in this sort of one-layered way, where his family had this totally different context to what John was dealing with. And then came the layers of like Macaulay and Conan, who were more observers and lived their own shared experiences of comedians and actors growing up in an industry that does have warning signs that John was battling with.
Macaulay, for example, was such an amazing interview to unlock a contextualization of what it’s like to battle an industry that will take from you. Macaulay was very nearly a cautionary tale. Thankfully, he’s created these boundaries and protected himself. With all this time, he was not only able to reflect on adding a really important point to the story, which was John’s care of children and how he saw through his own family experiences wounds that might have been placed on some of these young actors and was able to protect it in some way, or at least let Macaulay know that there was someone there looking after him. But then Macaulay is able to grow up and understand the traps that John himself found himself in.
All those things and Conan’s warnings, it all starts to build a bigger picture, which is what Darrin’s saying, too. If you save all the interviews for the end, you just start shaping the film, you only sort of know the film in one way. If you continue to add on it, it just continues to expose new ideas and then you follow those rabbit holes and then find the linking tissue. It just creates a bigger understanding of not only who the man was, but what he was dealing with and what maybe could even happen beyond his life or during his life that we’re able to understand a fuller picture.
AF: When you’re working on a film about a beloved comedy figure like John Candy, what are the biggest challenges in deciding what gets kept in and what doesn’t have the right place and has to be kept out?
Darrin Roberts: I would say that here’s a simple metric for me is that the movie has to be between 90 and maybe 120 minutes. If you start there, you have to decide what story you’re telling, what is maybe the premise of the movie or the argument that you’d like to make. That is the filter that you bounce off what’s included or not included, right? You’d love to include everything, but in the job sense of it, it’s not a four-part, two by two-hour thing. You have to create your structure based around what Colin wants as the director, what Ryan and the producers want from their movie, and start crafting with what you’re getting from the interviews and the archive and shaping it from there.
Even to go back to your last question, docs are process driven. Even if I’m starting with what I think is 75% of the interviews, and maybe it turns it into that was half of the interviews, you’re just going to keep working on it and keep working on it. You’re going to submit your cuts and you’re going to shape it with the team. It’s not like one person is deciding everything, although Colin and, in some ways, Ryan are spearheading what the movie should be. When you decide what to exclude, you put some things in, you take them out, you move them around. That’s at best what’s great about docs is that they’re not rigid to a script. In some ways, what you exclude can—they always talk about killing your babies. It tends to happen, but it’s always in the service of the bigger picture of the movie and what the audience can get out of experiencing your movie.
Shane Reid: Yeah, I’d also say that there was a point where we screened the film for small friends and family, and it screened very heavy, felt very heavy on message. You have the responsibility as filmmakers of—to your question, Danielle, about it being a comedy legend, is that so many of the memories are around warmth and safety, and that’s the way that people are. That’s the corner of their souls that they saved for John. To deny them that is tough. It becomes a balance of where’s the humor, but where are we continuing to learn? Because we all know John’s movies and we know his clips. We want to remind everybody, but we also are trying to follow who the man is at the time that these are happening.
What I found really interesting about John was you got to ask yourself, there’s so many other comedians of his era that are doing very similar work and while some of them are amazing comedians, there’s something that John possessed that was deeper than them. I think when you start to unravel the movie, and especially when you start to contextualize the man around those scenes, you realize that it’s really just about purity. John is just offering who he is to you all the time. When you understand where he’s at in his life with his family and his children, and then you contextualize ‘Uncle Buck,’ you go, Oh, this is what he’s dealing with. This is his relationship with children. This is him putting himself as a father into this and giving us that.
That’s the balance of, where’s the comedy versus the heart versus the trauma and how do we balance all those things together to service the fun of a John Candy movie with the information that you don’t have. We’re not just here to laugh at the movies again. We’re now here to uncover a deeper message, which is a little darker and a little sadder. We don’t want to ruin everybody’s relationship with the man. It’s a lot of fine balance and it’s just about showing people and responding to get that right.
We put a lot of faith in his family. They’re the ones that are presenting him. When they felt like something really worked, we leaned into it. When they felt like something was really inappropriate or didn’t, not that we had anything really inappropriate, but if it didn’t lend to that story, we took it out, and that’s the calibration.
AF: How closely were you working with Colin Hanks, Ryan Reynolds, and the Candy family?
Shane Reid: Very closely. Everyone was involved all the time. It was a very open experience and collaborated from all sides. I had never worked with Colin before. I thought he was fantastic and really excited about new ideas. Sean was an absolute beast of a producer who gave us everything that he could and unearthed everything he could. And then, George Dewey, Ryan, Johnny, and the Maximum team, they were so able to get behind the big swings that we needed to try and help the film along. Colin also had these relationships with family members that got them in front of the camera to be very honest in their experience and he created such a safe space for them. You had big pieces of music, big ideas that you wanted to ground, and you had to make it a big film. Maximum Effort was really key at getting that. Darrin can speak to this too, but I felt like everyone was on deck, everyone had the same mission, and it was a really collaborative experience all the way through.
Darrin Roberts: Yeah, the only thing I would add to Shane’s experience is that having worked with Colin now three times, I usually define his superpower as trust, which is the number one thing you need as a doc filmmaker is you need the people that you’re talking to to trust you. Maybe having done a couple of movies beforehand helped that. But essentially, that extends beyond production and the interviews.
It goes into post. He trusts Sean. He’s he’s been with Sean even before ‘All Things Must Pass.’ His trust in us to put together the movie and to try to channel his sensibilities and his philosophy of what he wants to put out into the world and he’s very trusting in that. So in a way, even if as editors, we sit alone in a room for eight to ten hours a day and cut by cut, moment by moment, work on it, that sense of trust feels like we’re very, very close with everybody as we’re working. It’s probably one of the best ways to not feel so isolated, even if you are working on your own, making it, making it, making it until you submit a cut.
AF: Shane, how did working with Ryan on this film compare to that of ‘Deadpool and Wolverine’?
Shane Reid: ‘Deadpool and Wolverine’—Ryan’s much more in the edit because he is constantly working on the shaping of comedy beats and dialogue. You’re almost working with him in the edit every day. This was a different experience, but what was similar is he does not stop until it’s right. The Maximum Effort thing really does pertain to their style, which is you keep pushing and you keep pushing and you keep perfecting. Similar to how Darrin’s describing Colin, Ryan places a lot of trust in the people around him. It’s a tight community of creative people who he can sleep at night knowing are going to put their best foot forward in creating a film that we’re all proud of. I think that’s the similarity in the two is that his work ethic is the same.
No matter if it’s a documentary or a big Marvel feature, he’s a passionate storyteller and he cares deeply about John and John’s family. I think John meant a great deal to him as he was forming his own creative path forward so doing right by John, doing right by Wade, those are things that are important to him.
AF: I know we’re supposed to be talking about the John Candy doc, but being a fan of ‘Deadpool and Wolverine,’ I have to ask, at what point in the process did you learn that Chris Evans was going to be coming back as Johnny Storm?
Shane Reid: (Laughs) Early on. It’s funny. The first script I read, they were all code names. I didn’t know Marvel. I wasn’t as versed in Marvel so I thought they were like deep-cut characters. I was like, who is this guy? There were characters called Lemon and there were all these code names. It wasn’t until I think there was a conversation when I finally came on board near production where I got to learn who the easter egg actors were that were coming back. I was terrified because I have a big mouth and I can get myself in trouble. Holding on to that kind of secret was like, when that film came out and no one knew, I was so relieved that I didn’t blow it. To be able to even talk about it now is I’m still even traumatized. Am I allowed to say what I knew? I mean, it was pretty early on, but man, he was fun in that movie. He was really fun. He delivered.
AF: I imagine that’s up there with Mark Hamill coming back as Luke Skywalker in the finale of ‘The Mandalorian’ a few years ago.
Shane Reid: Yeah. When we had Blade coming back, I was like, let’s go. I couldn’t believe it. But yeah, Evans was funny. I think the delight of seeing that misdirect of Johnny Storm—when the audience didn’t see that coming in the theater and you got to experience it for the first time, it was truly one of the coolest moments ever. I absolutely love it.
That’s the thing that’s a bummer right now with the internet is that holding on to those secrets is really hard. I’m sure you remember, but there were some set pics that were coming out on set the first few days that we were really nervous about because it was like, man, you’re going to ruin the fun for everybody if you don’t just allow this to be a secret and then reveal it in the right way. So that was cool.
AF: Seeing the end credits being a whole love letter to that Fox era of Marvel films, that was just a beautiful touch.
Shane Reid: I cut that piece. Thank you. I worked on that during the actor’s strike. We had downtime, and that was an idea that Ryan had and Shawn had. We just sat and cut that thing. I just sat and cut that thing and pulled it from all the movies. Yeah, it was lovely. It felt like a love letter and it felt like it would be a gratifying moment for the crowd. They knew how to do that really well, how to bring people to a theater and give them all these great kernels to make that experience one to remember, I think.
AF: Do you have a favorite John Candy film?
Darrin Roberts: I know everybody says it, but when ‘Planes, Trains, and Automobiles’ came out in the theater, my mom took me whatever year that was. I was a mid-teen. I remember seeing it at the Arlington Theater in Santa Barbara because we were on a road trip and it was just a fun thing to do. There’s that memorable scene where Steve Martin is very upset at the car rental company and he’s talking to Edie McClurg and he drops a thousand F-bombs. I’m 16 and I’m sitting next to my mom and I’m just thinking, this is insane. You get to the end of the movie and it becomes just so rewarding that it just is unforgettable. It’s the Thanksgiving movie. Every Thanksgiving, you’re stuffed full of food and you just want to veg out on the couch and you just put it on and it makes me feel all the feels and I just love it.
Shane Reid: Yeah, I love ‘Planes, Trains, and Automobiles.’ I think it took me a little longer to discover it in the right way. I think for me, it was always ‘Uncle Buck.’ I don’t even know if it was my first introduction to John, but I remember as a kid being so delighted by the danger that he possessed and when he was pulling out the screw gun and screwdriver and, and being like, hee, hee, hee, do you know about Richard? Just taunting this kid and being a really terrifying adult. I remember feeling like those kids in the movie. I was just like, what is this guy doing? Is it okay to do that? It was just a wild ride and so I think I attached to that more.
I think I discovered ‘Planes, Trains, and Automobiles’ a little older when I could understand the emotion behind it. It was such an emotionally heavy and beautiful film that I don’t think I would have understood the nuance as a kid. I definitely saw it as a kid, but I don’t think it stuck with me the same way. ‘Uncle Buck’ popped. I felt like Macaulay in that film, just watching him be a wild, funny guy and so loose. I loved that.