411 Movies Interview: Witless Protection Director Charles Robert Carner
Posted by Tony Farinella on 02.16.2008
411's Tony Farinella sits down with the director of Witless Protection!
Larry the Cable Guy returns to the big screen in Witless Protection, which hits theaters on February 22nd. Witless Protection follows a small-town sheriff, played by Larry the Cable Guy, who witnesses what he believes to be an attempted kidnapping. As it turns out, Madeleine is actually a key witness in a high-stakes Chicago crime case and her captors are FBI agents assigned to protect her. Along the way, we run into a myriad of crazy characters and crazy situations.. Needless to say, this is not your typical cop movie. In my interview with director Charles Robert Carner, we talked about Witless Protection, working with Larry the Cable Guy, shooting in Chicago, and a whole lot more.
TONY: How did this project first come together?
Charles Robert Carner: The way Witless Protection came about is Alan Blomquist, who produces all of Larry's movies. He's an old friend of mine, and we worked together about ten years ago when I directed a remake of Vanishing Point with Viggo Mortensen for Fox, and Alan produced that picture. And we've been friends for many years, and when he started making the movies with Larry, we just got together one day, and he said, "I'm doing these movies with Larry. Would you be interested in doing one?" And I said, "Sure." So, Alan had the original idea for Witless Protection, and we talked about it, worked on the story together, and I wrote the script, and it turned out well. After that, it was just a question of Larry's schedule and the timing, and I guess it was last January that Alan gave me a call and said, "Larry's schedule has opened up, and he wanted to do a picture this summer, and Witless is the one he wants to do." So, that's how it came about, and my hats off to Alan, because he's a great producer, and he's a great friend. I've made a lot of movies, but I've never made a comedy before, and he gave me the opportunity to do it. And it was great fun.
TONY:Witless Protection features a very interesting cast. How did the casting come together?
Charles Robert Carner: Getting the cast together was sort of a combination of things. I mean, one of the inspirations for the movie was Midnight Run, so we created the idea of picking up the character that Yaphet Kotto played in Midnight Run and bringing him back in this movie. Fortunately, Yaphet liked the script, so he agreed to do it, and that was a huge plus. Ivana is an actress who is incredibly talented and has made a lot of movies, but she hasn't had a lot of leading roles. Probably her most famous role or the one she's best known for is in Casino Royale as one of the Bond girls. She had the perfect combination of beauty, brains, and comedic talent, and it's pretty rare to find that, so we were really happy to have her. Jenny McCarthy, we got lucky. We sent her the script and made her an offer, and she happen to be available, and she signed on, which was great. So, Larry has two fantastic leading ladies. Eric Roberts is a guy I worked with before. I did a movie called Christmas Rush with Eric, so I called him up and said, "I'm doing this movie, and I want you to play this guy." Because Eric is a great athlete in addition to being a great actor, and I knew that I wanted to have this big fight scene between his character and Larry, and I wanted a guy to work with Larry who could really handle the fight scenes. And Eric did a great job with that. Peter Stormare is a friend of Alan Blomquist, the producer, and Alan called Peter up and said, "We're doing this thing. You wanna do it?" And Peter signed on. Joe Mantegna is an old friend of mine. When I was a student at Columbia, Joe was one of the teachers there, and he taught film acting. And we became friends, we've been friends ever since, but we've never had the chance to work together since then. So, same thing, I had the script, and I called up Joe and said, "I'm doing this comedy with Larry, and I'd love for you to do it. Is there a part in you'd like to do?" And he picked Doc Savage. When you see him in the movie, you won't believe it's Joe Mantegna.
TONY: Since you grew up in Chicago, what was it like filming Witless Protection there?
Charles Robert Carner: It was a great thrill, Tony. I've made parts of movies in Chicago over the years, but I've never had the opportunity to do an entire film in Chicago. When the planets aligned and made it possible, it was a tremendous thrill for me. Most of the movies that I have directed have been for television or for cable, and this is the first theatrical feature that I've directed, so it was fantastic to have my homecoming and my feature film debut in Chicago. It was tremendous.
TONY: What was it like working with Yaphet Kotto? Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think he's made a film in quite some time.
Charles Robert Carner: It was huge, because he was sort of semi-retired. He said he had been getting a lot of scripts, but just nothing interested him. He read the script, and he really liked it, so we just got lucky. Alan and I had lunch with him after he read the script, and he was very enthusiastic about it, he was very complimentary about it, and we were just thrilled, because one of the things that it meant, at least in our minds, was Yaphet Kotto is such a great actor who has done so many great roles, that having him involved in the movie sort of raised the bar. It elevated the whole thing. When we signed him, Larry said, "Oh, boy. A real actor." And Yaphet was just great to work with. It was a great thrill.
TONY: What's it been like screening this movie with an audience? How have they responded to it?
Charles Robert Carner: It's been very gratifying. When you make a comedy, you're trying to get all the different people in an audience to react the same way, and, in some ways, it's harder than a drama, because one person can be excited by a drama, another guy can be frightened, another guy can be moved. But with comedy, everybody's gotta react the same way, to try and get laughs. If you set it up and you do your job and nobody laughs, you've just got no place to hide. So, we've been fortunate to have good reactions. We previewed the movie and got feedback, and we made changes based on those previews. So, hopefully we've made the right decisions and the finished product will be something that people enjoy.
TONY: What kind of audience do you think your film will find?
Charles Robert Carner: I think your initial target, certainly, is Larry's audience ... the people who buy his Cd's and go to his concerts. That's where you start, but what I was hoping to do was make this a movie for non-Larry fans as well. At least the intention was to create a character that is funny, but also has a little bit more depth and a story that has humorous incidents and everything, but also has some heart. That's, at least, what we set out to do, so hopefully people who aren't familiar with Larry or are not necessarily fans of Larry will come and enjoy the picture because it's a good movie. That's what we're hoping.
TONY: From interviewing Larry in the past, I know he likes to have fun. Do you have good stories about Larry on set?
Charles Robert Carner: There's a couple of great Larry stories. I mean, you can have one any day and every day. Larry plays this small town deputy sheriff who has grand ambitions to be a big time lawman. He wants to work for the FBI and solve big crimes, so he's into self-help and self-improvement. One of the things he does is in the beginning we see that he's obtained his police training video in which you're supposed to perform various techniques, and one of the things that's offered on the video is a very complicated and expensive piece of training called the Gyro Spartan 3000, which is supposed to develop your reflexes and your agility and everything. Well, Larry doesn't want to spend the amount of money it would cost to buy the actual device, so he builds one out of broom handles and lawnmower motors and sort of puts together this Rube Goldberg version of it. So, the effects department built the thing, and I knew it could be funny, because it has various bars on it that you're supposed to either jump over or duck under or dodge around, and the thing goes around and around. And it's exhausting. But when Larry got one look at that thing, just the way in which he interacted with it was funnier than anything I could have told them to do. I simply set the thing up and turned him loose, and his sense of physical comedy took over, and it was Larry versus the Spartacus machine, because that was where I saw the thing in originally: in the old Stanley Kubrick movie, Spartacus, when Kirk Douglas is going through the gladiator training. Larry was just hilarious with it. There's also a scene where he's trying to get on an airplane, and he gets into a beef with the security people at the airport, and he winds up in a containment area and they're gonna strip search him and everything. After initially being enraged at the idea of doing a nude scene, he just created a lot of very funny improvisational moments in that scene. It was funny. When you see the movie, you'll see it. I set up the situation and everything, but Larry just took over and made it much funnier than it would have been the way I originally intended.
TONY: Since this was your first theatrical movie, did you feel a lot of pressure on set?
Charles Robert Carner: The good news about the way these films are made is that Alan Blomquist is the producer and his company, they finance the movie, and Alan is someone I've known for a long time, and he's just very supportive and a terrific producer. So, I didn't have a lot of pressure. We felt that the script was funny, we pulled together a good cast, and Alan provided an environment where I could make the movie the way I wanted to make it, as long as I didn't go wildly over budget. So, I didn't feel any unnecessary pressure or unusual pressure. Alan did a great job of creating an environment where we can just go and have a good time and make the movie. It was a great experience.
TONY: I'm sure it's hard to pinpoint just one memory, but what's your most vivid memory from shooting this film?
Charles Robert Carner: Well, actually, it isn't hard in this case. What happens in the story is Larry thinks he's rescuing this damsel in distress, and she turns out to be a witness being protected by the FBI, and they wind up being on the run. And she's supposed to testify in a big corporate scandal trial, and the villain, played by Peter Stormare, is the head of Enron, our version of Enron, and he's this British ex-patriot who lives in the Chicago area. He lives in a giant mansion, and he plays polo on his front lawn, so the climax of the movie was gonna be this polo match that Larry crashes and completely ruins. And throughout the preparation of the movie, there was a lot of concern, because polo is expensive and the horses are expensive. It's a big production to have, and this is a small movie. I mean, our budget was tight. So, we had a lot of stunts and a lot of stuff that we wanted to pull off when we were doing polo, and we only had two days to shoot all the polo. So, we got all of it together, and we had two wild days, and at the end of those two days of shooting, I pulled everybody together, everybody did a fantastic job, and I just said, "I've made a lot of movies, I've been doing it for a long time, but shooting this sequence has been the most fun I've ever had making a movie anywhere." And hopefully the audience will enjoy it as well.
TONY: What did you learn from this experience?
Charles Robert Carner: From a learning standpoint, it was really all about comedy, because this was a new thing for me. Part of it was learning from Larry in terms of his ideas, his creativity, his rhythms, and part of it was also trying to bring him and bring his persona into a real movie, a real story. So, I wanted to try and make the movie as cinematic as possible with beautiful locations and interesting photography so that everything, all the different elements, would support the story, and it wouldn't just be Larry doing his shtick, but it would be a real story with real characters and real scenes. It was tremendously fun and a great education. One of the things I learned about comedy is that you have to be ruthless about what you're doing, and you have to really lay the foundation for your jokes and pay them off and you can't fiddle around. In a comedy, you kind of need to move on. You need to tell the story efficiently, so that you've got room for the humor to play.
TONY: You have been around the movie business for a number of years, but this is really your first big break. What have you learned about the Hollywood journey?
Charles Robert Carner: The quote I always use is one that I heard from George Lucas. I don't know that he actually said it, but at least it's the legend. People would always come up to him and say, "How do you make it in show business?" And George would always say, "Somehow." I think everybody's journey is different. The idea that I would be directing a feature film comedy and that would be the first feature film that I directed, I could have never predicted. You just never know. But the thing I would say is that I've always tried to do business in an honest way. I try to be straightforward with people, I try to be fair, and I try to be truthful with people. I'm loyal to the people that I respect and who are truthful and loyal to me. Alan Blomquist and I have been friends for a long time, and I think that that approach had meaning in this case, because he gave me the opportunity to make a movie that no one else would have given me that opportunity. Alan knew me and respected my ability as a filmmaker and helped create an environment for me to hopefully be successful with this new experience. We think we've made a funny movie. We think it's good, and we enjoyed doing it. We think it's great, but we'll see. We'll see if the audience will come.
TONY: Finally, what are your plans for the future?
Charles Robert Carner: I've got a bunch of different things, and I don't know what is gonna happen. I might be coming back to Chicago to make another movie. Larry and I are talking about doing another picture together. We've got an idea for a comedy western. It's a very funny idea, we like it, but we'll see. I'd love to do that, and I think it would be a ball. I had a good time with Larry, and I'd love to make another picture with him.
