LET’S BE COPS and THE GIRL NEXT DOOR with Director Luke Greenfield

As his latest comedy Let’s Be Cops enjoys huge box office success, director Luke Greenfield reveals how a past run-in with the law inspired the movie and he recounts how a “miracle” letter from Steven Spielberg helped shaped his career.

Greenfield said the idea for Let’s Be Cops came out of a personal experience of “doing wrong stunts” after film school in Los Angeles and New York during which he actually impersonated police officers.

He said the shenanigans took place when he was 29 years old and got arrested in Tempe, Arizona. “At first we were doing a hidden camera show – a very sick, mean-spirited hidden camera show, and we got arrested in Arizona while we were shooting it and I had to do community service, which brought role models together,” Greenfield joked.

“It was more than just impersonating a police officer, it was also aggravated assault and disturbing the peace – it was a very mean-spirited hidden camera show and we went a little too far.”

For his community service, he said he rejected offers to work in a soup kitchen or work with the elderly and instead proposed to the judge that he participate in a mentorship program to help kids learn the filmmaking business. The judge agreed and he ended up getting about seven interns for his projects that summer.

He spoke about how he was able to get his cop comedy off the ground. “Getting the film made was very tough because you’re talking about, how do you do an action comedy with not recognizable faces, at a big studio? FOX makes X-Men, FOX makes James Cameron movies. So an action/comedy to them is big names, big stars, big budget.”

Greenfield says he stated making his own movies at a very young age and when he was 16, his mom – whom he describes as a “passionate” writer – decided to write a letter to Hollywood icon Steven Spielberg to introduce her son and his work.

“Without me knowing, she wrote this very passionate letter to Steven back in 1988 when Amblin was at its heyday I guess. She wrote this passionate letter and she included two of my junior high school films… She sent a package, and we don’t really know, but a miracle happened.”

But he said his mother neglected to include a return address with the package. “Her whole purpose was, ‘Steven, does little Lukie have what it takes to make it in film and what should I do as a mother?’”

He describes what eventually happened as a “miracle” when Spielberg actually watched his short films and read a research paper he had written that pointed out some of Spielberg’s Oscar snubs in the ‘80s such as The Color Purple and Empire of the Sun. “I wrote a research paper about that called ‘Steven Spielberg: The Star They Wouldn’t Let Shine.’”

Amazingly, Spielberg responded by hand writing a two-page letter to Greenfield encouraging him to go to film school. “But they didn’t have my return address and there was no Internet at the time. So the story goes, I wasn’t there, Steven gave this letter to his team of assistants and said ‘Hey, find this kid.’ And all they had was Luke Greenfield and my high school name.”

But when representatives for Spielberg kept contacting the high school, nobody thought they were legit and it was against school policy to give out the information, so they would always hang up the phone. Finally, a letter arrived after the high school contacted his mother to tell them about the calls. “I was waiting for this hand-written letter to arrive, and it kind of changed my life.”

Greenfield said the content of the letter was beyond his years to understand at the time. “He was giving me advice about filmmaking that I didn’t quite understand until after film school, and even more so, making studio films.”

He revealed one of the greatest and articulate things Spielberg said in the letter: “Imagination is where stories begin. But the truth in the telling is what really reaches audiences, and that truth can be found in your neighborhood.” He said he feels like this was an example of Spielberg’s “genius writing,” showing that all of his career blockbusters were still personal to him in some way.

Speaking about The Girl Next Door, Greenfield said the studio actually waited for him to finish The Animal before he jumped into the new project.

He added that he told executives he wanted to take a crack himself at the script, which he described originally as “dirty, raunchy and super tawdry.” But he wanted to give the movie more reality and take it in a slightly “wilder” direction.

When the studio kept telling him it was going to be another American Pie, he ultimately convinced them that it would also be “much more real and dangerous.”

Greenfield says he felt gratified because after convincing the studio to take a chance on him, once he got the final script he felt like all the elements fell into perfection for the very first time in his career.

“The Girl Next Door was one of my most beautiful, cherished experiences because I didn’t know how good and how lucky I had it,” he recalls. “They gave me $20 million in 2002 to go off and do a grounded, realistic film - a coming-of-age story about a kid getting way over his head in danger. And it doesn’t really happen like that today.”