- The most memorable scene in “Hitch” was created on the day it was shot.
- “Hitch” director Andy Tennant came up with the scene to accommodate an idea from star Will Smith.
- The scene was shot on Sarah Jessica Parker’s doorstep.
The 2005 romantic comedy “Hitch” is filled with memorable scenes, but the most memorable one of all wasn’t even in the original script.
The scene, in which Will Smith’s date doctor Alex “Hitch” Hitchens is helping show his client Albert (Kevin James) how to walk a woman to her door, was originally a lot different, director Andy Tennant told Business Insider.
Initially, Hitch and Albert were simply walking down a brownstone-lined street in New York City reacting to the news that Albert has been photographed dancing with socialite Allegra, (Amber Valletta), the woman he’s trying to woo.
“The scene on that street was originally just three or four lines,” Tennant told BI. “We were then going to do a company move somewhere else.”
But Smith thought the location was “a great street,” and suggested doing a bigger scene.
“Now, he’s right,” Tennant said, “But it’s also, ‘Uh-oh, there goes the schedule.'”
With any movie, shooting is scheduled around what’s written in the script. Locations and shooting permits are secured, and production crews set up cameras and lighting to make what’s on the page become a reality on screen. Changing plans last-minute can be a logistical nightmare.
To complicate things further, then-Sony chairman Amy Pascal was flying in to have dinner with Tennant and Smith that night, creating an even stricter time crunch: “Now we’re off the rails and we have to come up with something.”
The rest of the day was dedicated to creating a scene from scratch.
“We start talking, and somehow the conversation turns to, ‘In New York City, do you say goodbye to somebody at the bottom of the stairs, or do you walk someone to their door if it’s a brownstone?'” Tennant said. “Then Will started saying stuff about the 90 and 10: a man goes 90% of the way, and the woman goes 10% on a first kiss. So we messed with that for a bit, and then someone came up with the keys jingling. Then Kevin was riffing on some stuff. It was all just an idea.”
But there was also another issue. The movie didn’t have permission to shoot in front of any of the brownstones on the street. So Tennant and Smith took matters into their own hands.
“Will and I went to a brownstone we liked, walked up to the door, knocked on the door to see if we could get permission to shoot there, and it turned out to be Sarah Jessica Parker’s house,” Tennant said, noting that though Parker and Smith knew each other, she was still clearly in shock that the “Bad Boys” star was on her doorstep.
“So she was like, ‘Hi!’ And we were like, ‘Hi, can we shoot on your doorstep?’ And she was like, ‘Ah, yeah.'”
Reps for Smith and Parker did not respond to BI’s requests for comment.
Around four in the afternoon, after Tennant and one of the producers wrote three or four drafts of the scene, they thought they had it down. But Smith was hesitant.
“Kevin James told him, ‘It’s really funny. It’s going to be a good scene,'” Tennant recalled. “And thank god for Kevin, because he got Will to shoot it.”
The scene became the movie’s most memorable moment, as Hitch teaches Albert how to walk a woman to her door and engage in a first kiss, only for Albert to get too carried away in the role play and end up kissing Hitch on the lips.
“We shot a five-and-a-half-page scene in three hours and then went to dinner with Amy Pascal,” Tennant said in amazement.
The making of “Hitch” was full of complicated, frustrating, but sometimes also rewarding incidents like these. Tennant described the entire shoot as “a battle,” from convincing Smith to do the Ellis Island scene to coming up with the movie’s wedding-scene ending on the fly.
After shooting wrapped, Tennant told BI he called his wife and told her he thought he’d just ruined his and Will Smith’s careers.
In reality, the movie became a box office hit. The $70 million comedy had the biggest opening weekend ever for a rom-com at the time and went on to earn over $371 million worldwide.
“There were some debates, but there were things that turned out really funny,” Tennant said. “It was a wild ride.”
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