Everyone is bound to have laughed at Will Ferrell at one time or another. While his comic tendencies may not be for everyone, he's covered so much ground over his career that it's impossible to have remained stone-faced at all the various roles he's played along the way. Blue Oyster Cult, anyone?
For me, Will Ferrell's films have ranged from the hilarious (OLD SCHOOL, STEP BROTHERS) to the surprising (STRANGER THAN FICTION, EVERYTHING MUST GO) to the head-scratching (BEWITCHED, KICKING & SCREAMING) to the disappointing (LAND OF THE LOST, THE OTHER GUYS) to the ones I still just don't get (ANCHORMAN - watched it twice, still don't see why anyone thinks it's funny). However, it's that potential for comedy greatness that has had me and so many others coming back time and time again to see what Ferrell may have cooked up for his next film. This time, it's CASA DE MI PADRE, an all-Spanish comedy in the spirit of a telenovela, which teams Ferrell back up with his long-time producing partner Adam McKay.
I was able to chat for a good amount of time with Will Ferrell while he was in Miami to premiere the film at the South Beach Comedy Festival. While not what you would expect from some of the more outrageous characters he's played in the past, Ferrell was rather reserved and soft-spoken, as we talked extensively about the humor of CASA DE MI PADRE, his feelings on an ANCHORMAN sequel and the future of STEP BROTHERS. Enjoy...
Will Ferrell: Hey, Billy, it’s nice to meet you. Are you guys from here [Miami] or L.A.?
The Infamous Billy The Kidd: I’m from here.
Will Ferrell: Okay, cool.
The Kidd: So this is the eighth film I believe that you have done with Adam McKay’s involvement other than doing some of the television stuff and Funny Or Die.
Will Ferrell: Right.
The Kidd: What is it about that partnership that you keep going back to that keeps being so fruitful as far as doing more and more projects that kind of attract you?
Will Ferrell: Well we quickly kind of found out on SNL that we just had a shorthand with each other that was unique for me and unique for him and you know it’s as simple as discovering that you just laugh at the same jokes and you view taking… I describe it as some of the people would be like taking a certain choice as a risk where we are like “Oh no, no keep going in that direction. Yeah, yeah, exactly” and it just kind of has snowballed and yeah, we just…
The Kidd: Just someone who gets you and as a result…
Will Ferrell: Yeah, we get each other and you know I’ll give him notes on something then he will say “I was just going to say the same exact thing” and vice versa. Even though this was an idea that I had come up with, we kind of ran it through our production company together, once it was time to edit the movie Adam had great notes and was able to help us with some funny additional ADR laughs that we put in later and things like that. I think we both feel fortunate that our paths crossed.
The Kidd: Stemming from where the idea comes from, because all of the films that you have done together have been remarkably different. They have all had different focuses with kind of the same comedic tone to them. Where does it come up from where you’re like “Hey, so I’ve got an idea. What if we just do a movie entirely in Spanish and we kind of do it like an over dramatic telenovela style?”
Will Ferrell: Yeah, I wish I had some poetic flashy answer for you like “I was in the bathtub clipping my toenails and some hot sauce spilled on my foot and I got the idea” or something. I don’t know when and where it happened, but I know in a general sense it was just flipping around the TV and stopping on one of these telenovelas going “God, they are so over the top. It’s so fantastic.”
The Kidd: They are beyond soap operas.
Will Ferrell: Exactly! Obviously soap operas are melodramatic to begin with, but there’s a whole other sheen to it, a whole other level.
The Kidd: Soap operas can’t even touch telenovelas.
Will Ferrell: I just remember thinking “That would be funny… You’ve never seen an American comedy person put themselves in that world and fully commit” and not have the joke be that I speak Spanish poorly, but that I’m essentially a member of this all Latino ensemble cast and I just had that idea for the longest time and then I think…. God, when did we make the movie? A couple of years ago when I heard someone was maybe writing a script for a studio that was a telenovela and I thought “You know what, I’ve got to try to execute this idea, because otherwise someone will do it and I’ll be sitting there watching it going…”
The Kidd: “I should have jumped.”
Will Ferrell: Yeah, so that’s kind of how it happened and then Andrew Steele, who wrote the script with Matt Piedmont… They are old buddies from SNL, so that became the team.
The Kidd: How well was your Spanish going in? Did you speak it pretty well or did you kind of have to go into a crash course?
Will Ferrell: I had to… I mean I had my high school Spanish.
The Kidd: Your basics?
Will Ferrell: Yeah, I had my basics down! And when I say “down,” I can nail the basics, but the basics are “Por favor,” “Hola,” “Como estas?” “Muy bien y tu?” “Hasta luego!” But yeah, I met with a translator probably three to four times a week about a month out from shooting the movie and then literally every day he would show up at my house and we would drive to set and go over that day’s work. Obviously he was on set every day helping me with stuff and then that night we would drive back and start the work on the next day’s scenes, so yeah I was just constantly running it. I really wanted it to be as authentic as I could get it.
The Kidd: Going back to watching the telenovelas, how much did you watch as the project was kind of forming to draw the balance between “Okay, this is what telenovelas do as far as how over dramatic they are” and then taking it one step further to make sure that you are able to bring the comedy into the film? Telenovelas, if you are just watching, they are already somewhat funny, because of the fact that they are so over the top.
Will Ferrell: You know I really didn’t watch them… I don’t know if I watched them hardly at all after kind of getting the germ of the idea. We just kind of knew that general area that we would be in and then it was really a lot of Andrew and Matt were big fans of kind of these Mexican Spaghetti westerns that are horrible jump cuts and you know a guy shoots someone in the stomach, back to the reverse, and they don’t react, then back to the guy holding the gun and then back to the guy, like badly composed shots, boom mics in the shot… You know. So then we thought “This should be a hybrid of a dash of telenovela mixed with poorly made Spanish language film in a way and then maybe that will be a nice mix of all of these things.” Then on top of it, in terms of writing the script, it was fun to kind of throw in a little bit of satirical edge in there in terms of getting a comment on U.S./Mexico relations and our perceptions of them and vice versa. We thought “This is a great opportunity to kind of… That’s what Diego [Luna] and Gael [Garcia Bernal] and those guys really responded to. “It was so interesting that you guys are able to capture this perspective and yet you are Americans and yet you still kind of see our views.”
The Kidd: You still kind of get it.
Will Ferrell: Yeah, you still kind of get it. So that was kind of the big stew that we started making.
The Kidd: A lot of the gags aren’t necessarily character driven. There are a lot of things that happen, whether in the background or off to the side with like the mannequins. How much of that is built into the script going in and how much of that is then “I have an idea. I think this will be funny, let’s try it out.”
Will Ferrell: Yeah, it’s kind of both. There’s stuff... Such a huge plot point is the Onza, a mechanical cat that talks to me, was well planned out, but then when…
The Kidd: But like in the wedding scene everybody is massacred and there’s just this one guy off to the side just smoking a cigarette.
Will Ferrell: That’s just Matt and Andrew like “Let’s just have one guy who never gets affected.” (Laughs) But then Matt would be like… When we found out that Genesis’s dad was “El Puma,” this really famous Venezuelan pop sensation like “I’m trying to get him to play with the wedding band and I want him to play a “Wider Shade of Pale,” so these things just started happening as we were filming and then we would get the idea of like Andrew had written… He literally wrote “Armando… they embrace in this steamy love making scene.” It’s like “There’s a lot of shots of butts. Way too many shots of butts.” So we knew we were going to do that and then I think Jessica Elbaum, one of our producers, was like “It’d be funny if all of a sudden it was just a mannequin you were rolling around with,” so that was like another thing we added. It was a nice… Things just kept getting stronger and stronger and stranger and stranger. What I love about the movie, at least in my opinion is that for as over the top as it is, there are those subtle things like a guy just sitting there smoking or Diego getting gunned down and still taking a sip of his drink as smoke is pouring out of him. I was like “How did you think to do that?” “He’s like, I don’t know. I should have something.” Then we just kind of came up that I’m always rolling my cigarettes, but I’m terrible at it and the one scene where it’s me and Efren [Ramirez] and we are sitting there talking about how beautiful Genesis is and I’m rolling my cigarette, but its just spilling out every where. That was not planned, I was like “I cannot do this, but I’m not going to get out of the scene” and then I just ended up throwing it away and pulling out a rolled one. Those were just things we kind of went with.
The Kidd: This is Matt Piedmont’s first directorial feature film and you have a lot of history going back to SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE and working with him. Is that familiarity and comfort level with him what brought him into this film?
Will Ferrell: Absolutely. Andrew was the first guy I brought in, too. I just pitched him the idea and he was looking to write a script and I was like “Andrew, this is right up your alley, because you love this kind of over the top like bad language or poorly composed language.” He was like “Okay” and he got to doing it and we started talking about directors and they were like “Matt would totally come up with a visual style that would be so unique” and we just lobbied for him even though we could have gone out to probably bigger names and that sort of thing, but we just knew he would be so committed and sure enough he was the most tireless guy on the set. He was like [snaps his fingers] till that last hour of daylight still trying to shoot the last shot. It was his idea to get these old lenses from Panavision to shoot the movie on, so that’s why it has kind of a nostalgic looking quality to it and kind of that throwback vibe to the costumes and everything. That’s all Matt.
The Kidd: With all of the fan demand that was pushing for a sequel to ANCHORMAN, were you at all disappointed that Paramount decided to pass on it when it seemed like everybody wanted to make it happen?
Will Ferrell: You know… Obviously that’s something that is near and dear to our heart and would be a blast to make, but at the end of the day it’s just kind of their decision. There’s only so much…
The Kidd: You guys can do.
Will Ferrell: Yeah, and really it’s more fun to see all of that fandom. It’s kind of gratifying to see that there’s such love for that movie, which was a movie that in looking back ten places past in one day… I guess it’s a typical Hollywood story. There’s so many stories like that where you have to keep pushing something and shopping it around and this and that and it will hopefully finally bubble to the surface, so it’s kind of beyond our control and if it happens one day, great, and if it doesn’t there’s a lot of other stories to tell.
The Kidd: I’ve got to ask you about my favorite film of yours which is STEP BROTHERS.
Will Ferrell: (Laughs) Okay.
The Kidd: I watch it non-stop now.
Will Ferrell: It’s funny you brought that up, because that’s actually what we are trying to do a sequel about. It’s not something you’d think we would make and yet it’s kind of found this following in a weird way that John [C. Reilly] and I were talking about it. It’s like it keeps getting…
The Kidd: More and more people watch it and you tell people to watch it. “It’s really funny. Just watch it.” Then they come out and are like…
Will Ferrell: I just rode in Mardi Gras last weekend in one of the big parades, I had just as many STEP BROTHERS references, because people make posters and do all of this stuff and there were posters like “Did we just become best friends?” I had a bunch of like New Orleans police officers on horseback and they were like “It’s the Catalina Wine Mixer!”
The Kidd: I tell my wife all the time, “This is a house of learned doctors.”
[Both Laugh]
Will Ferrell: Someone held up another sign that said “There’s so much room for activities” and we are kind of giddy that… I can never predict how these things kind of grow in these ways, but all of a sudden we were like “Maybe we should revisit Dale and Brennan and see what they are up to.”
The Kidd: How much closer is that to maybe happening? And, on top of that, I know Adam McKay got people really hyped last year when he tweeted about a STEP BROTHERS rap album.
Will Ferrell: Yeah, we started working on that and that could still happen. Everyone just kind of got scattered, but we are kind of coming up into a window where I think we might have some free time here to commit to something like that. Adam’s finishing up on something. I’m finishing promoting this and then in a coople of weeks we are going to sit down and see if we can…
The Kidd: Soon enough we may have the “Boats and Hoes” Remix?
Will Ferrell: Possibly, yes.
The Kidd: (Laughs) I hope so. That to me is one that’s really just built over time. I was somebody that got exposed to it on DVD and now that’s my go-to movie. I’m like “What do you want to watch at home? STEP BROTHERS!”
Will Ferrell: It was also one of the best reviews we got negative from Roger Ebert who was like emphatically like “Don’t go see this movie. Don’t rent it on DVD.” It was almost like “This type of behavior does not need to be rewarded” and I guess that’s the sadistic side of us like “It made us laugh so hard that someone sat in a screening room and was like “No!” It was like a written shaking of the fist, you know? I don’t know, it tickled us for some reason.
The Kidd: And then my last question is I know that recently you got attached to FLAMINGO THIEF, which is kind of once again another different type of picture for you. What’s the outlook as far as that going forward? Is there a target as far as when its going to get shot?
Will Ferrell: Not as of yet. I’m hoping to sit down with Paul Feig. He’s expressed interest in maybe directing and you know it kind of… It’s just another kind of fun… It’s nice. For some reason I seem to be hitting this pocket where I’m getting to kind of do left of center indie things along with the big studio stuff and it’s like movies like CASA and then big movies like the movie I just did with Zach and all of these things mixed together is just the best. So yeah, that would be something I would try to do down the road, but we don’t have a definite plan as of yet.
The Kidd: In terms of you still doing kind of left of center comedies, is there a part of you that still wants to branch out and do more of the dramatic stuff like STRANGER THAN FICTION or EVERYTHING MUST GO?
Will Ferrell: Yeah and FLAMINGO THIEF is kind of once again in a… EVERYTHING MUST GO was probably the darkest thing I’ve done in a way, “dark.” So FLAMINGO THIEF, yeah, it’s more in that serious vein with peculiar funny moments. I love that stuff. As long as an audience will have me do it… If someone writes a check for it…
[Both Laugh]
Will Ferrell: You know, if someone is going to support a budget and we can get it made and as long as I can keep doing it. I think at the same time I never want to be seen as forcing a moment. It’s hard to articulate, but like it’s never… I never want to come off as “Look at me do this other thing,” but I think it’s just human nature to want to keep trying to explore. It’s really fun.
The Kidd: Alright. Thank you very much. I really appreciate it.
Will Ferrell: Yeah.
The Kidd: Thank you.
CASA DE MI PADRE hits theatres this Friday, March 16.
The Prestige Worldwide album... not soon enough.
-Billy Donnelly
"The Infamous Billy The Kidd"
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