Everyone’s favourite Sticky Bandit, Daniel Stern, was the original choice for directing Jim Carrey comedy Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, but the actor has now shared why he turned it down.
Home Alone is a staple Christmas watch in most households, but did you know that one of the actors was the original director for Ace Ventura: Pet Detective?
That’s right. Daniel Stern, who played Marv in the first two Home Alone films, has recently revealed in an interview with Comicbook.com that he was in line to direct the Jim Carrey comedy but turned it down. Stern made his feature film directorial debut with 1993’s Rookie Of The Year, but has since only directed TV shows.
“The thing was, when Rookie came out, I got a ton of offers to direct other films,” Stern said. “But it was also the time when I was doing a sequel to Home Alone and then doing a sequel to City Slickers. Just to be crass, I hit the cash cow for the one and only time in my life as an actor and it was like, ‘I don’t think I can jump out with my family. I got to sock some of this away.'”
Sounds reasonable.
“Then I was the original director of Ace Ventura, and I was on Varsity Blues and I had things, but then I got another job. So I’ve been trying to direct something and I’ve directed a bunch of television stuff […] I did a show, Manhattan, that I directed. It was on a few years ago about the atomic bomb. I thought for one second about directing For All Mankind. No way. I wouldn’t be able to pull it off. It’s too big. It’s too technical.”
Stern currently stars in For All Mankind as Eli Hobson, an administrator for NASA in the AppleTV+ show’s fourth season which premiered on the streaming service in November. Tom Shadyac ended up directing Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, which received terrible reviews from critics, but became a box-office hit with a worldwide gross of $107m (which was quite big at the time).
“I’m a much better director than I am an actor,” Sten also said in the interview, noting the sheer difficulty of making a film these days, but it seems that Stern might return to the director’s chair yet.
“I do want to direct one more film, because I love that. Directing, it’s really getting the best out of other people. That’s the gig. You see everybody’s talent and you get the best out of it. Not just the actors, but the prop guy, and the lighting guy, and the camera people. You motivate the crew and you put everybody on the same track for the same vision of the story to tell. It’s a wonderful human getting the best out of a human job. I do want to do it again and I had the time of my life directing Rookie Of The Year.“
