Will Ferrell, Mark Wahlberg, Eva Mendes, Michael Keaton and Adam McKay The Other Guys Press Conference
Will, growing up or when you became an actor, did you always want to play a cop? Was doing the comedy version the way for you to do it?Will Ferrell: "No, I can’t say - - I mean, I did as a kid, I’d walk around with a pair of nunchucks on my side, which is not really law enforcement related. I guess like a martial arts thing."
Michael Keaton: "Well, you had incarcerated your mom there."
Will Ferrell: "I built a jail in my closet and I would incarcerate my family from time to time."
Adam McKay: "Can I ask you about the nunchucks situation? When you had the nunchucks though, were your vaguely thinking, 'I’m on the side of good. I’m out here for justice?'"
Will Ferrell: "I guess it was. I guess it was like a vigilante justice, like a guardian angel type thing."
Eva Mendes: "How old were you?"
Will Ferrell: "I was six years old. Six to nine, those three years."
Adam McKay: "Were they homemade nunchucks or actual nunchucks?"
Will Ferrell: "They were rolling pins. Nunchucks made out of rolling pins."
Adam McKay: "Wow, that just ruined the whole story."
Michael Keaton: "Is that for real?"
Will Ferrell: "No."
Were you inspired by John Woo for the gunfight scenes?
Adam McKay: "Oh yeah, well I think you can’t do any action without in some way paying homage to John Woo. He’s the guy who just invented that sort of next level of poetic nasty action. So yeah, the second we went slow motion, our DP actually shot a couple John Woo movies and my script supervisor worked on it, so we actually were talking about John Woo. The great thing he always does, too, is I love when he plays the beautiful song to counter the nasty action. We could have done that for the whole movie. We did it with 'Monday Monday' in the end but I never got tired of it. So yeah, John Woo’s around any action scene being shot."
Will and Mark, will you let your kids watch this movie? Do they like watching you play awesome action heroes?
Will Ferrell: "You know, my six year old is just starting to figure out what it is I [do]. Like he just this summer leaned over to me and was like, 'By the way, dad. I know what you do. I know you’re in movies, just so you know.' But he still doesn’t really know. This movie’s probably still a little too old for him probably."
Has he seen Elf?
Will Ferrell: "No, no."
Eva Mendes: "That’s mean."
Will Ferrell: "I think he saw it when he was like two or three years old and he started crying when I had to float away on the iceberg. And I said, 'You keep watching it. You quit crying. This is about Christmas. This is about joy so shut up.'"
Mark Wahlberg: "I never let my kids see anything I do."
Do they know what you do?
Mark Wahlberg: "Oh yeah."
You have a lot of Upright Citizens Brigade talent in the film. Is there any difference directing those guys?
Mark Wahlberg: "Are those all those f--kin’ comedy guys that would show up every day? F--kin’ oh my god."
Adam McKay: "The funniest thing was Mark would do these scenes and Mark’s not familiar with that crazy UCB scene and all these guys who literally what they do for a living is improvise every single day of their life. So a waiter, all the line was was, 'Here’s your coffee, sir.' And of course I tell all the guys, 'Show up with extra improvised bits.' They would just be going after Mark every scene. Mark would just come over to me and go, 'It’s another one of those improv guys, isn’t it?'"
Mark Wahlberg: "You don’t understand, literally every f--king scene, some guy wants to fight me. I looked at Will and go, 'How many comedians are there in this f--king movie?' It’s like you and Sandler and a couple of other guys. Sh-t."
Was there ever a joke that one of the henchmen looked like Samuel L. Jackson in Pulp Fiction?
Adam McKay: "You know, that actually came out of a joke that got cut out of the movie which is we had them give a sketch artist description of that guy. The joke was supposed to be that when they described him, it looked really racist. He had a giant afro and a bone in his nose. So the sketch artist was African American was like, 'F--k both of you. This is offensive.' It actually was offensive so we cut that joke and we were left with this kind of odd looking henchman. So we actually digitally removed the nose, yeah."
Can you talk about where the idea for the opening scene came from?
Adam McKay: "You might want to address Mark. It was his idea. Mark shot that actually. It was one of the times where our D.P. said he couldn't handle it and he said, 'I can.' That was actually shot in pre-production. We were just supposed to do stills of these guys drinking at the bar off a digital camera. As we approached it we were like, 'That's kind of boring. I've seen that before.' We had seen that video of one of the clowns fighting the police that was circulating on the internet for a while and Oliver - our D.P. - and I just loved that. We said, 'Why don't we take a crack at the low budget version of it?' We just sort of did it by the seat of our pants. We had no idea if it would work. I think that was all put together in five days that whole thing, which was crazy. Then that song covered up a lot of our mistakes."
Mark, can you talk about the Entourage movie?
Mark Wahlberg: "We hope to do one but we still have another season and a half to go so they could certainly mess it up before we get the opportunity to do the movie. We'll see what happens."
Eva, are you playing Maria Callas in Greek Fire?
Eva Mendes: "Actually, Julian Fellowes is writing the script write now for me based on Nick Gage’s Greek Fire. It wouldn’t focus on any of her actual performances and her singing. It would focus on her relationship with Aristotle Onassis which I’ve become very obsessed with. It’s a very interesting kind of tragic Greek tragedy within itself. So it wouldn’t focus on the singing."
So it’s when she was already thin?
Eva Mendes: "Yes, it’s when she became Callas. So yes."
Mark Wahlberg: "Do the weight thing. You’ll win an Oscar."
Eva Mendes: "Done, got it."
Do you try to peel away the layers of diva and find the person?
Eva Mendes: "Well, it has nothing to do with her becoming Callas. It’s already her being Callas, meeting a man who she gave everything up for which was her dream. But what she didn’t realize was when she gave everything up for this man, he left her because that’s exactly what he wanted, the everything. So it’s a really beautiful tragedy."
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The Other Guys hits theaters on August 6, 2010.
