How Director Jason Moore Made ‘Shotgun Wedding’ a True Destination

A destination wedding seems great right about now, doesn’t it? After several years when you couldn’t go further than the corner store, hopping on a plane and witnessing your friends getting married in paradise seems like a dream come true. In Shotgun Wedding, the nuptials are interrupted not just by cold feet but by gun-toting pirates. Director Jason Moore is no stranger to delivering buoyant fun, but Shotgun is his most ambitious film yet.

Moore and I start our conversation by praising Jennifer Lopez’s star quality. I mean, how could we not? By this point, Lopez has done it all, but she manages to make it look easy. Unlike some other starts of her stature in romantic comedies, she makes us believe in the superstar-as-an-everywoman quality. According to Moore, that ease translated to everyone else on set.

Balancing breakneck action with laughs is trickier than it looks, but Moore understands the delicacy of balance. If the violence is too harsh, you turn off the audience and the comedy is insufficient. If he leaned too heavily on absurdity, the stakes wouldn’t feel fully raised. Even when it comes to blocking and spacing, it matters like in those awkwardly funny pool hostage scenes. For a director with Moore’s stage background (hello, Tony Award nomination for Avenue Q…), he thinks about how it translates to the audience visually as well as the text.

Maybe we need to retire the term “romantic comedy,” because Shotgun isn’t solely interested in telling a story of just walking down the aisle. It goes beyond that. We all aspire to fall in love, but revealing what you truly want is where the tension lies. Yes, these crazy kids are getting married, but if they can survive a wedding gone horribly awry, then they can definitely take on anything. That’s aspirational.

Shotgun Wedding is streaming now on Prime Video.