Jason Reitman on finding the truth about SNL in his movie Saturday Night

Jason Reitman had a good reason for missing the first episode of Saturday Night Live. He hadn’t been born. By the time the future director came into the world, in October of 1977, the show was already in its third season. Charles Grodin was hosting. Paul Simon, already a two-time host, was back as the musical guest. Even then, SNL was on a roll. It’s been rolling ever since.

And so, like so many of us, Reitman grew up with SNL already on the air, overheard and eventually (when your bedtime got late enough) seen and enjoyed.

“I probably came in during the Eddie Murphy era,” Reitman tells me during the Toronto International Film Festival, where his film Saturday Night had its Canadian premiere. “I was already watching reruns of the original cast … like Jon Lovitz, Kevin Nealon, Nora Dunn, leading into Adam Sandler and Mike Myers; that really became my core high school cast.”

These days, SNL’s performers include Bowen Yang, Michael Longfellow, Devon Walker, not to mention Colin Jost and Michael Che with Weekend Update. But Saturday Night the movie takes us back to a very specific place and time — the studio at 30 Rockefeller Plaza on the night of Oct. 11, 1975. The very first episode of what was then called NBC’s Saturday Night.

The building was crammed full, even overflowing with talent, some of them still relative unknowns, others on the cusp of greatness, all looking to turn live television on its head.

Billy Crystal was rubbing elbows with George Carlin, who was tripping over Jim Henson and Andy Warhol (both played by the same actor in the film). Chevy Chase was sparring with Milton Berle, while Billy Preston was getting ready to sing, Gilda Radner was riding a camera crane, John Belushi was doing cocaine, and Dan Aykroyd was hitting on everybody.

Or were they? Reitman is clear that Saturday Night, while it hews close to the truth, is not a documentary.

“A documentary and a narrative feature are different things,” he says. “And the purpose of a narrative feature is to feel something. My guiding truth was: What did it feel like, moments before this show went to air, when it seemed impossible?”

When he started on this project he briefly became a journalist, interviewing everyone (well, everyone still alive) who was in the building that day, from the NBC pages up to the show’s creator, Lorne Michaels, played in the film by Gabriel LaBelle.

“We tried to get every story … not only to understand what happened, but most importantly to understand how it felt to be in the room,” he says. “And as we interviewed everybody, we learned that none of their stories lined up, and they all contradicted each other.

“But between all of them, we found a truth, the truth of what it felt like to be there, what it felt like when this generation of talent in their early 20s ripped television out of the hands of the last generation, and what it felt like to make something that had never been done before.”

And Aykroyd? “I asked him directly: What were you feeling in the moments right before you went live? He goes, ‘I remember exactly what I was feeling.’ Which for Dan Aykroyd is totally normal, because he has a memory like a computer. He said, ‘I thought, you know, I still have a snowplow in Toronto, so there’s a job waiting for me if this all fails.’”

Reitman hopes Aykroyd and Crystal and Chase and everyone else is happy with how they appear in the film. Though he adds: “I can’t imagine what it’s like to watch … your life be portrayed on screen. I hope I never do anything interesting enough that causes someone to want to make a movie in which I am a character.”

It’s an understandable desire, but also: Saturday Night is certainly interesting. “This is the trickiest movie I’ve ever made, in that it’s not 60 or 70 consecutive scenes,” says the director whose credits include Thank You for Smoking, Juno, Up in the Air and The Front Runner.

“Because it’s one scene. You may go through a door and run into other characters, but at the end of the day, it’s all one continuous piece of action. We’re basically following one character (Michaels) as he moves through a building, as a show comes together and he faces all these different obstacles. And I wanted the audience to feel like they were in a real place.”

That said, “we can always yell cut and go again. And live television is an animal like no other, and the people who create it — and I’m talking about the craftspeople, the camera people, the people in the control room — they’re like Navy SEALs. There’s ice in their veins, and I don’t know how they do it.”

My interview time is running out, so I decide to ask Reitman about another project of his: The live read. Since 2011, he’s been producing live performances in which a group of actors read through a well-known screenplay.

They usually do it in Los Angeles, but a few times they’ve come to the Toronto Festival: Boogie Nights with Jesse Eisenberg, Josh Brolin, Olivia Wilde and others; American Beauty with Bryan Cranston, Christina Hendricks and Adam Driver; The Breakfast Club with Aaron Paul and Richard E. Grant; and The Princess Bride with Rachel McAdams, Chris O’Dowd and, appropriately, Cary Elwes.

But it’s been a while since he mounted one here. What gives?

“I actually just haven’t had the chance,” he admits. “They’re very difficult to pull off, much like an SNL episode. They come together at the last second, particularly at TIFF where you’re just trying to pull actors who might be available in between doing press.”

He continues: “I love them. I love that they’re not recorded. I love that they only exist at one point in time and they’re for the audience and they live in our memories. I’ll definitely do one again. I’m sorry I don’t have one for this year, but we literally just finished this movie a week ago.”

Fair enough. Apologies (and promise) accepted. Until then, we’ll always have Saturday Night.

Saturday Night opens Oct. 4 in Toronto, and wider on Oct. 11.