Tim Allen has opinions — vocal ones — at the movies.
“I pick apart movies — mine, anybody’s,” he said during a recent visit to his hometown of Birmingham, Mich. “I love movies. If I go to movies with people, they generally don’t go with me again. ‘Tim, you talked all the way through that.’ ‘But did you see that? That can’t happen. That doesn’t work. There was a different car that came in.’ I’m a continuity freak.”
Now it’s time for the 56-year-old star to let audiences critique his skills behind the camera.
“Crazy on the Outside,” which opens Friday, is his debut as a film director. He also stars in the comedy with a cast of talented actors — Sigourney Weaver, Ray Liotta, Jeanne Tripplehorn, J.K. Simmons, Julie Bowen and Kelsey Grammer.
It’s a new chapter for the funnyman, who’s worked with a lot of directors and knows what he likes and doesn’t like in cinematic humor.
“That’s pretty much why I did this,” he said. “Because I said, ‘Lemme see, big mouth, let’s see how funny you are when you do this.’”
Allen’s career as a performer has taken him from sitcom superstardom — his long run in the 1990s as Tim Taylor of ABC’s “Home Improvement” — to blockbuster films like “Toy Story” and “Toy Story 2.” And he’ll be back as the voice of astronaut Buzz Lightyear when “Toy Story 3” arrives in theaters June 18.
With “Crazy on the Outside,” he wanted to do a comedy for grownups.
“After doing ‘Wild Hogs,’ I realized those of us that are over 40 are getting a little tired of teenage comedies, where it’s teenagers having sex for the first time or teenagers get into a frat house,” he says. “That’s where the comedies were stuck at.”
In the movie, Allen plays Tommy, a man who’s rebuilding his life after spending three years in prison. He moves in with his devoted sister (Weaver) and wisecracking brother-in-law (Simmons) and gets a job at a fast-food chain.
As he tries to re-launch his family’s painting business, he has to deal with a strict probation officer (Tripplehorn) and an old friend (Liotta), whose video piracy scheme landed Tommy in prison.
Allen, who directed an episode of “Home Improvement,” describes reading the screenplay (by Judd Pillot and John Peaslee) a few years ago and loving it. When he found himself with a window of free time before his next project, he got encouragement to make the film from a famous actor-director pal.
“A friend of mine, Kevin Costner, says, ‘You’re going to keep talking about this until you do it. The only way to do this is finance it privately’ — and he showed me how to get that done — ‘and you’ve got to direct it, because you want to do comedy your way and add your twists.’”
Allen’s company, Boxing Cat Films, produced and financed the project. It’s getting a limited national release by Freestyle Releasing.
One of the film’s producers, Anastasia Stanecki, said Allen’s set was an upbeat place.
“From the day he said ‘go’ on this project, he wanted it to be a fun experience for everyone and it was,” she said. “He set the tone.”
Stanecki said filming was done in Los Angeles in 2007, before the Michigan filmmaking incentives were enacted. She said Boxing Cat Films is interested in doing future projects in Michigan.
“We want to shoot in Michigan. We have a few projects in development and we talk about it and we think about it,” she said.
As a director, Allen threw in small moments and visual puns — like a figurine with moving eyes. “I really wanted to add my little sense of humor to it with little scenes in there. … It’s a lot of stuff I really like, fantasy sequences,” he said.
He also toned down the racier aspects of the story and edited out some language he felt was gratuitous (the film is rated PG-13).
When he was asked about his ex-con character and his real-life stint in prison in the late 1970s for selling cocaine — an experience he has said turned his life around — there was no awkwardness.
“I’m so past my past,” he said, describing the theme as a coincidence.
Allen said he has often wanted to do a film about his experiences in prison. “I didn’t have a good time, but I still got laughs. I’m a funny guy, even in prison. And some of that stuff was pretty funny. This movie wasn’t about that.”
