[Movies] Peter Farrelly Talks Movie 43 Posted by Joseph Lee on 01.22.2013
It opens Friday...
Coming Soon spoke with Peter Farrelly about his anthology comedy project Movie 43, which he put together with producer Charles Wessler (Dumb & Dumber).
Farrelly directs two of the segments: "The Catch", about a blind date between Kate Winslet and Hugh Jackman, and "Truth or Dare", a dating segment with Halle Berry and Stephen Merchant. The rest of the movie includes the stars Elizabeth Banks, Kristen Bell, Anna Faris, Ricchard Gere, Dennis Quaid, Emma Stone, Johnny Knoxville, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Naomi Watts, Uma Thurman and Seth MacFarlane.
On being inspired by Kentucky Fried Movie: "It was really the brainchild of Charlie Wessler and he started thinking about this a few years ago, about doing sort of a "Kentucky Fried Movie" thing except with a wraparound. "Kentucky Fried Movie" went from short to short to short and in today's low attention span world we're living in, if you do that, after an hour people are like "Okay, I don't want to start another short." Which is why we have this wraparound that connects all these shorts. There's something that you're following, which is the search for "Movie 43" which keeps you invested right to the end. (Note: A couple of days later, we got a call back from Farrelly saying that they had decided to go with a different wraparound, one involving Dennis Quaid as a down and out Hollywood producer who is pitching ideas at a studio, going from room to room pitching to the likes of Greg Kinnear, Seth MacFarlane and Common, getting more desperate as he goes along… and apparently he's carrying a hand grenade.)"
On his prediction of how the movie will do with critics: "Well, I promise you this is what is going to happen. This movie is going to score about a 13 on the Rotten Tomatoes scale and being at the movie is going to be like being at a rock concert, because it really is an unusual thing. It plays through the roof because it's so out there that people are like, "Oh my God." It's not going to get good reviews, but it's going to be a huge thing for college kids."
On getting Kate Winslet for raunchy comedy: "First of all, any great actor I know can do comedy. When I started doing this years ago, people would say from the first movie we ever did, "Dumb & Dumber," the studio was fighting Jeff Daniels 'cause they'd say "Nah, nah, nah, you gotta get a comic actor." I said, "What does that even mean? They're not writing it. If you have a great actor, they can do comedy. Trust me." Jeff Daniels can do comedy. They were talking about names that were just big comedy guys and back then, a couple times I tried to get De Niro into a movie and they were like, "Are you crazy? He doesn't do comedy, he does drama." Of course, he's this big comedy guy now. I've always believed that any good actor can do comedy. As for (Kate), I didn't know her but like in the first ten minutes that I met her, I realized that she has a really dark, twisted sense of humor and this was going to be a lot of fun because she really wanted to go for it… as did Hugh, as did Halle Berry. You knew that Stephen Merchant would of course. Halle Berry, I remember when she read the script, the first draft of hers, she said, "Oh, c'mon guys, you have go to for it a little more. I feel like you're pulling back." So we were like, "Oh, okay, we'll take another pass at it." She really wanted to cut loose."
