Director Jason Reitman and writer Gil Kenan SNL Talk

“Saturday Night” has several fun runners returning throughout the film. In one of them, writer Tom Schiller walks around the set of Studio 8H with incense. In another instance, Lorne Michaels' executive assistant (and cousin) Neil Levy, played by Andrew Barth Feldman, occasionally comes on stage and counts down the time remaining until the show airs.

Kenan: One of the things I love most about Lorne (Michaels) and Tom (Schiller) and their New Age practices is that Lorne is non-judgmental. He spent time on the west coast. He accepts it. In fact, she embraces him when the time is right. Yes, these are two examples. Tom's censer and Neil Levy's countdown runner are two concepts we had no idea about before we interviewed both of these people. As for Neil Levy, we talked to Neil, who was Lorne's cousin, and we thought we were completists. We really felt like we were just filling out our mental map of who was there that night. While talking to Neil, a figure began to materialize. By the end of that interview, we realized that we had something that we could really use to give our story a sense of momentum, comic momentum.

Tom is an amazing character. I just went back to our interview with him. That's what made writing this book so exciting and complicated. We had to make some really difficult choices about who to focus our energy on. Tom Schiller deserves an entire movie about him as a character. He had an amazing run on the show. He ended up taking over the movie segments, became the guy who created the iconic “SNL” short film concepts after the end of the Albert Brooks era, and ended up pursuing a feature career. He is a real personality. Anyway, one of the things was that we ended up with a lot of story, and our job, both relying on our own experiences as filmmakers and just starting to focus on Lorne, was to create a coherent and driving shape for It.

Additionally, there's a pivotal moment for Lorne Michaels (Gabriel LaBelle) as a hero when he realizes the disturbing truth about his potential future if he doesn't make “SNL.”

As we approach the third act of “Saturday Night” and the clock ticks down to the live premiere of “SNL,” Lorne Michaels is left without a lightning technician. However, he hears that there may be a good replacement on one of the remaining floors of 30 Rockefeller Plaza, specifically where “The Rumpus Hour” was filmed with Milton Berle (JK Simmons) and some dancing girls. When Michaels goes to “Confusion Hour” to recruit a lighting technician, Berle is dancing with his girls, so he waits on the sidelines for the shot to end so he can steal his new crew member. As he looks at the remnants of old television, at the tired formula of aging TV personalities delivering the same thing, his gaze shifts to the show's director, who sits forlornly in a production chair with a cigarette in his hand and stares into the distance, not even paying attention to the recording of the show. This is the moment Michaels needed support to keep going in the face of increasingly insurmountable odds, so he rushes to grab his new lighting technician and broadcast “Saturday Night” live.

Reitman: This moment happened on the day. I was just thinking about that shot because it's unlikely. He takes them through the entire “Hour of Confusion” all the way to the stairs, and I felt like something was missing. And I thought, Oh, you know what would be really interesting? If Lorne saw this alternate future where he thought, “Who would he be if he didn't stand up for himself? Who would he be if he didn't act on his beliefs?” And the funniest thing is that I have to look through all the supporting actors and think, “Who looks like a failure?” (laughs)

Near the end of the film, in one key, uplifting sequence, the entire cast and crew gather to help complete the real brick floor that was used for the main stage. It's a moment of unity in a group of people who have been at each other's throats all evening.

Reitman: When I heard that they actually laid the bricks for the home base – that is mad. No one would ever do that, especially in New York. When you're shooting on the eighth floor of an office building, why are you laying bricks? But they were obsessed with real details. This showed that neither of them had ever worked in television before. That the set designer is from Broadway. It was like, “Yes, we'll lay real bricks,” and it seemed like at the last second these two generations finally had the opportunity to join forces.