Mike Myers creates his first new character since Austin Powers in The Love Guru, a comedy about love, life, and hockey from first-time feature film director Marco Schnabel. Myers stars as Pitka, a free-spirited guru who tries to help star hockey player Darren Roanoke (Romany Malco) win back his wife from legendary goalie Jacques ‘Lo Coq’ Grande (Justin Timberlake). If he can pull that off, then maybe there’s a chance Roanoke’s team can win the coveted Stanley Cup.
At the Los Angeles press junket for Paramount Pictures’ The Love Guru, Myers revealed he’s always been fascinated by Indian culture. “I grew up in Toronto and as long as I can remember, as long as there was cable - even those old cable boxes that were wired to the TV - there have been Bollywood movies on Toronto TV,” said Myers. “They were on channel 47 and they were on at two o'clock in the morning. I'm an insomniac and I have been since the age of like 11. I'm not a really good sleeper. I used to come home and I can't remember his last name, but it was Rakesh, Rakesh would come on and it would be Indian cinema night and it'd be like at three o'clock in the morning. He would say things like, 'Still awake? This next adventure…’ I would watch it and go, 'Wow. This is just a tapestry.'”
“It was so different and, ultimately, it's Austin Powers. It's all singing, all dancing, very bright color palettes. I didn't know that then because I hadn't written it yet, but I was like, ‘This is just a fascinating parallel universe that's going on.’ I think it's so amazing that I live in a country that views itself not as a melting pot, but as a salad bowl that has a ministry of multiculturalism and they have a multicultural channel and at two o'clock in the morning I get to see Indian movies.”
Myers continued, “The Indian influence of this movie is that in 1991 my father passed away and I went on a spiritual quest. It was a light one, not too terribly deep because I'm not terribly deep and neither was my father, which was the source of this spiritual quest. I started reading voraciously. I'm a voracious reader now. I read constantly. I saw Deepak Chopra on the Oprah show. I'm very humble, not terrible lofty – I didn't come to this in any other way than my father's death was a source of tremendous pain. I saw him on Oprah and I went, 'His philosophy and his writings speak to me.' It's in the way that Carl Sagan was to physics, and he's a scientist in his own right, but he also says, 'Come over here. If you like this, you'll like this other stuff.' He's kind of like a great librarian, Deepak is.”
Myers says it was Chopra who led him to reading material from all around the world in his quest for knowledge. And it was while talking to friends about a book he was reading that the idea of doing the Pitka character was his born. “What happened was that as I was telling my friends as they asked, 'What are you reading,' and I would say, 'This wonderful thing called The Only Way Out Is In.' And this voice started happening and I went, 'Huh. What?' So I did a stage show in 1994 - five characters. For the first time I did Austin Powers and for the first time I did the Guru Pitka.”
“Austin Powers was a tribute to my father and all the British comedy that he had introduced me to and the Guru Pitka was an extension of me dealing with my father's death,” said Myers. “One dude that I wanted to see all of my success the universe had taken away from me, and I didn't understand why. I would talk about intimacy and love without knowledge and knowledge without love and then love with knowledge and all of these things. Friends would call me up and say, 'I'm feeling depressed. Talk to me in the voice.' 'You're a beautiful creature. The universe loves you.' “
Myers has read Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now and Gary Zukav’s Seat of the Soul. “I also read the classics,” offered Myers. “I reintroduced myself to Kurt Vonnegut and all the great stuff he's written. He's probably the only author that I can say I've almost read everything of Kurt Vonnegut Jr. has written. There are a couple of the latter day books that I have yet to read. I started to read this stuff and I think the sort of philosophy, the fictional philosophy in the movie that I created is called DRAMA, which is distraction, regression, adjustment, maturity and action. The underpinnings of it are, and this took a long time, creating these fictional teachings, but with distraction you're distracted away from your emotional pain and brought to a place of calm. So you think about regressing to a time when you were a little kid and you were told things about yourself that aren't true anymore. It's the difference between guilt and shame. Guilt is, 'I feel bad, dad.' Shame is, 'I am bad.'”
“Shame is something that's given to you by your environment when you're a little kid. So you distract yourself out of your current pain and regress yourself to that time when what was written in your shame core – that's the first A. You are mature. You accept responsibility. Maturity is taking responsibility for your own health and happiness and you put all of it into action, which is the second A. Distraction, regression, adjustment, maturity and action. That's DRAMA. DRAMA is the philosophy that is what I believe, which is that you're responsible for your own health and happiness. You're not a victim, which is a vicious and insidious cognition. That's where I want to get to.”
Page 2: On Mariska Hargitay and Future Films
