More Jason Bateman:

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He smiles his sideways smile and leads me to the golf cart, parked right next to a BMW 7 Series in a space reserved for JASON BATEMAN.

**GQ: Are you still in touch with Ricky? **

Jason Bateman: No.

GQ: Were you friendly during that period?

Jason Bateman: Very friendly. We hung out a lot. We’d ride our bikes around the lot for ercise, or fucking around, and we’d hold on to the back of one of those trams [gestures at a tram full of tourists on the tour], and we’d let the tram pull us along this route right here with the people in the back of the tram going, "Oooh, it’s those two kids from Silver Spoons!" We’d have the tram pull us all the way up to Jaws Lake, where we’d roll up our pants and wade in and net a bunch of goldfish and put ’em in a plastic bag to take back to Ricky’s fish tank in the schoolroom. He had a bunch of fish-eating fish, you know, like big fish that all they ate was fish? Eventually the tram people sent a letter to our parents saying, "Can you please have your kids stop wading in Jaws Lake? They’re ruining the effect. You know, ’cause people are supposed to be afraid of this great white shark—"

He pauses as the tram approaches Jaws Lake and the fake shark swims toward the tourists. There’s some kind of faux fire erupting on the surface of the "lake."

I don’t remember there being fire in Jaws. Look, there’s the shark!... So cheesy.... You’d think they would update this thing, right?... Oh, my God, that guy’s about to be eaten. Trouble! Look at the blood.

**GQ: Jesus, if you’re 6, that would be legitimately terrifying. To see that massive thing coming up at you? **

Jason Bateman: Special effects! That was pretty good.

**GQ: Okay, ****_Arrested Development. _****What was that like to get everyone back together after all those years of talking about it and fans clamoring for it? **

Jason Bateman: It was something that, every month or two since the end of the show, there would be an update about the progress [about some kind of reunion]. So it wasn’t that big of a shock when it happened, because it always seemed like it was a half a year from happening anyway. But when we did finally all come together on the set, it was pretty neat. I just don’t know how many examples there are of that—where people get to come back and do a reunion-type situation and have it not be a bit of a Hail Mary, careerwise. That show launched a lot of our careers and everyone is doing great, so to come back together while things are going well is really a fortunate situation. Everybody had to be big boys about not making it financially impossible.

GQ: What else can you tell me about the show? The entire Internet wants to know.

Jason Bateman: The last line of the last episode of Arrested Development was Ron Howard saying to Maeby—she’s pitching him a show about her family at Imagine—and he says to her, "No, I don’t see it as a series. Maybe a movie!" And then the screen goes black. That’s it. So Mitch [Hurwitz, the show’s creator] was always planning on writing a movie. Every time he went to start a movie script, there was so much work to be done just to fill the audience in on where the family had been since the end of the show, and to also initiate the uninitiated about who these characters are. So he thought: The only way to tell a story of this size is to do the first act in episodes. So it’s really a hybrid distribution of one big story. The episodes are simply act 1, and the movie will have act 2 and act 3 in it. So one does not work without the other.