Minnie Driver says Grosse Pointe Blank was fully improvised because original script 'just wasn't funny'

When it comes to Minnie Driver's varied acting career, one film stands out as being particularly "revolutionary" to her: Grosse Pointe Blank. The reason, as she puts it, is that the film was almost completely improvised.

On the latest episode of SiriusXM's This Life of Mine with James Corden, Driver opened up about what led to this wild way of making the 1997 black comedy, which stars John Cusack as a hitman who returns home for his 10-year high school reunion and reconnects with the ex-girlfriend he still has feelings for (Driver).

"We were making [Grosse Pointe Blank] and the script isn't really that good, and everyone knows the script isn't really that good, but it's this great idea," Driver told Corden. "So we shot a couple of days and I remember it wasn't really that it was disastrous, but it just wasn't funny."

She continued, "So [Cusack] went to Joe Roth, who was then head of Disney, and said, 'Can we just improvise? Will you just give us a week and watch the dailies and tell me if you don't think that it's great?' And George Armitage, who was the director, bless his heart, was kind of forced to go along with that."

(In a 2016 interview, Armitage described the film as a "collaborative" one and added, "we had everybody improvising. We shot so much film on that movie. Everybody was so into what they were doing.")

And thus, Driver said, "we improvved the whole thing." As a result, "it felt like we were going to go up in flames every single day," though thankfully they didn't. The film was well-received by critics, and though not a major box office success, the comedy's dark humor gained it a cult following in the years since its release.

Driver credited the decision to improvise with making the film "funnier and funnier and more and more sort of rooted in the insanity of the story."

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She also touted Cusack for getting her involved in the project. "I got sort of vaulted into this because I read with Cusack and we had this massive connection. And then he said we should just come and hang out and like, we should see what's up, which I did," she told Corden. "And what I realized was, the way that they make things is like, it is this moving creative train, and if you want to jump on board and make stuff, then do that and be willing. And I was."

In the end, Driver walked away thinking, "This was sort of a revolution of the way in which you make films. And I knew that this was in a bubble, and I probably wasn't going to make a film like this again because it was like a runaway train. It was amazing."

In addition to Cusack and Driver, Grosse Pointe Blank starred Alan Arkin, Dan Aykroyd, Joan Cusack, Jeremy Piven, and Hank Azaria.

New episodes of SiriusXM’s This Life of Mine with James Corden air Thursdays on Stars (ch. 109) and on the SiriusXM app.