After such a bruising encounter with Land of the Lost, Will and his audience would be happy to see him teaming up with Adam McKay again. Will said, ‘He’s one of the most creative directors I’ve ever worked with. It’s fun to be on set with actors who have never worked with Adam before, watching their reaction as he creates an environment where everyone feels safe.’
Speaking to to Premiere, he said: ‘The Adam history started at Saturday Night Live. We were hired at the same time and started writing sketches together and shared the same comedic sensibility. We liked sitting down, taking an hour writing a sketch, and then not going back, and working really fast and kind of not judging it too much. Because SNL is a place where some writers would tend to spend a whole evening crafting this one sketch, and we found out whether we spent the whole night or one hour it came out about the same. I had done Lorne Michaels’ film A Night at the Roxbury, and I owed Paramount one more. Adam I and I had talked about writing a screenplay maybe just for the fun of it, and I thought, “Let’s write an original movie that’s not based on an SNL character.” And so we wrote August Blowout (about a car salesman) which never got made. And we said: “I love working with you, vice versa, and so let’s keep going with it.”’
This was the opening speech by Will’s character in the script of August Blowout – and you can see echoes of many of Will and McKay’s creations: ‘Hi, I’m Jeff Tanner and I sell cars. The only thing I love more than a finely crafted American automobile is the hot rush of adrenaline I get from selling one … Meet my car: the Ford Explorer. It’s rugged, sexy and American … like me … And just like this bad boy, Jeff Tanner is fully tricked out with all the features … I come with a confident handshake, an outstanding ass, a saddle in my bedroom, and except for some screw-up by J. C. Penney’s, a near spotless credit report. And guess what? That’s all standard … For Jeff Tanner life is all about three things; speed, steel and gas. You think cheetahs are fast? Fuck cheetahs. My speed is American made. I’ll be honest. I’m hard right now.’
McKay said about their relationship: ‘We all met the same day we were hired. Koechner got hired, Ferrell, myself, another writer named Tom Gianis, and Cheri Oteri, and we all went out for beers. I always joke that Will, when you meet him, is pretty unassuming, and I figured, “Oh, he must be the straight guy that they hired.” But then at the first read-through, it was, like, “Oh, no, he’s not the straight guy at all!” (Laughs) Even though Ferrell is a great straight man. But, yeah, to say that it was just Ferrell and me that hit it off isn’t right, because everyone loved writing for Ferrell. And he’s a great writer himself, so in that sense, writers really get along with him, and he’s very easy to collaborate with. But we just started writing a particular type of scene together that was just kind of strange, and only Ferrell was kind of able to pull it off, performance-wise, in order to get it on the show. And we just kept loving these scenes we were writing that were so crazy, like Bill Brasky, Insane OB/GYN, Neil Diamond: Storytellers, and that kind of stuff. And, then, obviously, I wrote a lot of the Bush stuff, too. So when he started doing movies, y’know, he had an option, and he was, like, “Hey, you wanna write something with me?” And that’s when we wrote the car-salesman script, August Blowout, and from there we just kept writing, and we wrote Anchorman and this other stuff. So, yeah, it’s been a long time since we met in 1995.’ (Bullz-Eye.com)
Their next project together would be The Other Guys. The Other Guys was described thus: ‘NYPD Detectives Christopher Danson and P. K. Highsmith (Dwayne Johnson and Samuel L. Jackson) are the baddest and most beloved cops in New York City. They don’t get tattoos, other men get tattoos of them. Two desks over and one back sit Detectives Allen Gamble (Will Ferrell) and Terry Hoitz (Mark Wahlberg). You’ve seen them in the background of photos of Danson and Highsmith, out of focus and eyes closed. They’re not heroes, they’re “The Other Guys”. But every cop has his or her day and soon Gamble and Hoitz stumble into a seemingly innocuous case no other detective wants to touch that could turn into New York City’s biggest crime. It’s the opportunity of their lives, but do these guys have the right stuff?’
The little seed that every movie is grown from originated at the 2007 Academy Awards. Will Ferrell and Jack Black were performing a routine on the biggest stage. Their routine consisted of firing mock insults at the nominees, including Ferrell rasping at Ryan Gosling: ‘You’re all him and now, well, I’m going to break your hip. Right now.’ Jack Black also got into the routine with relish – telling Peter O’Toole ‘I’m going to beat you down with my Nickelodeon award.’ However, when Ferrell tried to jibe with Mark Wahlberg, he jokingly began to feel intimated. ‘I won’t mess with you. You’re actually kind of a badass. Once again, I hope we’re cool. You are very talented.’
Ferrell told Entertainment Weekly: ‘We thought that intensity, that unblinking menacing thing he has, put in the proper context, could be really funny. We learned on Saturday Night Live that it’s fun to work with actors who aren’t necessarily known for comedy, and just throw them into the mix, because they commit to the character and the idea.’ Wahlberg revealed how he managed to land the part: ‘I’ve been a huge fan of theirs, and they invited me to dinner and asked me if I’d be interested in working with them, and I said, “Are you kidding me?” And it was literally before they had even told me what it was about and what the part was, and I had already committed to doing it. And then they told me a little bit about it and then, of course, they went off to write the script. I just couldn’t believe it.’
McKay revealed how the film came about to the website Den of Geek: ‘There’s always just some little small purchase point you have. In the case of Anchorman, it was that Will saw an interview with a 70s anchorman, talking about how sexist they were. And it was that tone of voice he loved. With Talladega Nights, it was the NASCAR, Bush, Red States of America. With this one, it was really a dinner with Mark Wahlberg. We went out with him, and Will and Mark sat next to each other, and Mark made us laugh all night long. He’s a great guy, really funny. And I just walked away, going “you guys have to make a movie, that is one of the most interesting, odd chemistries I’ve ever seen, and clearly he knows how to play.”
‘That was the genesis of it, and just from looking at them, and based on Mark’s background, I thought, well, it should probably be an action comedy. We haven’t done that yet, either, and that’s always exciting. And then I had that idea of the other guys – who are the guys in the desks next to the superstars. And quite honestly, it wasn’t about until halfway through the whole thing that I realised that we were making a cop buddy film. It hadn’t even occurred to us, because, let’s face it, it’s almost a kind of almost a dead genre, in a way. Really, the only good cop buddy movie in the last 10 years is Hot Fuzz, I would say. I can’t think of any others. So all of a sudden, we were like, “Oh, my God. We’re making a cop buddy film,” and we actually tried as hard as we could not to have it be a spoof. But, just by virtue of it being a cop buddy film, it is a spoof. It’s like doing a comedy that’s a Western. Immediately, it’s a spoof, even though you’re doing everything different, or trying to change things. You know you have to hit certain beats, and it’s just the way it goes. So we kind of knew that. We said, “All right. It’s going to be a cop buddy film. Let’s do our darnedest to make it as original and funny as we can. Probably we’ll fail in some cases, and then it’ll be a spoof.” That’s how we got into it.’
Wahlberg added to Cinema Blend: ‘I have my own way of doing things and I’ve always been extremely sarcastic, I had to be pretty quick considering where I came from, being the youngest of nine kids. The only thing I had was my mouth, and that also got me in to trouble, but it wasn’t like it was something I wasn’t comfortable with, you know? The world in which the story takes place and everything is definitely in my wheelhouse. Had I been out of my element and we were doing some English period piece then maybe I wouldn’t be too quick. But I certainly felt like I could hold my own in that situation.’ Not everyone is suitable for improv. Will told Empire magazine: ‘We had one actress in Anchorman auditions who just wouldn’t do it. We said, “We’ll just improvise it, if you don’t mind.” She replied “No, I’m not going to do that.” We were like “Well, you don’t have to worry about being funny, let’s just play around and see if anything happens.” But still she said: “No, I’m not going to do that.” So for some people it’s a daunting daunting thing.’
Will and Mark were close to working together on Cop Out – a buddy cop movie starring Bruce Willis, and Tracey Morgan wanted to freshen up the buddy movie format that had become popular thanks to films like Lethal Weapon and 48 Hours. He said: ‘All those old movies had drug-smuggling story lines, if you do that now, it would be quaint. Who gives a shit about guys selling drugs at this point? Crime has taken on massive proportions, destroying the Gulf of Mexico, stealing $80 billion. Stealing a billion dollars is nothing now, that’s almost adorable.’
They pitched the film to the studio. There was no script, just the idea of Will and Wahlberg playing a couple of second-string cops. Will said to Entertainment Weekly: ‘It was a similar situation with Talladega Nights. With that one, we basically just had the idea of me as a NASCAR driver, and it became a crazy bidding war.’ Sony landed the movie. The working title was The B-Team. But there was a problem. 20th Century Fox were developing The A-Team. McKay said, ‘Fox was not happy. We also hadn’t pitched the movie to them, so they were doubly mad.’ McKay claimed the studio had a legal right to block a similar title being used up to six months of its own release: ‘It’s amazing that you can do that, but they could. I ended up liking The Other Guys better anyway.’
McKay says that his challenge was to keep the set as open and free to experimentation as he could, while also keeping it grounded enough that the action sequences made sense. He is quoted on Stack Net‘Obviously, we like to do silly, absurd things. The Other Guys is an action comedy, and I think it’s just as funny as the movies we’ve made in the past. But it’s also a bit more badass. We really tried to come up with action scenes we hadn’t seen before, and I think we came up with some fantastic stuff.’ McKay said about working with Samuel L. Jackson and Dwayne Johnson: ‘Obviously, you could make a legit action movie with Sam and Dwayne. We kept joking, it’d be called Critical Hour. We’d do the movie trailer: “As the clock approaches midnight, where will you be?” For our movie, the whole premise being that the other guys replace the superstar cops, they were perfect.’
They turned to Michael Keaton for the role of the precinct’s Captain Mauch. In the production notes, Keaton said: ‘He’s the type of guy who just wants to get to the end of his shift and call it a day, so we wanted to bring in some real-world problems with Mauch. I come from a family of cops and I know about the pensions and working 20 years and getting two kids through school, so he has a second job at Bed, Bath, and Beyond. It’s tough to come from running a police precinct and then going to run the housewares section. What I decided is that his second job is not just something he has to do. It’s something he loves. He’s way more at home at BB&B than he is in the precinct.’ And Keaton loved the experience, saying: ‘I got up, I read my Times, I grabbed my coffee, I walked to the set. I love walking in New York. Then I started laughing, right from the time I got on set, and I finished laughing after I got back to the hotel, because I’d be thinking about everything that happened during the day. I stayed in a nice hotel, I went to bed, and I woke up and did it all over again. How great is that job?’
Wahlberg loved the experience as well, saying in the production notes: ‘It’s fantastic. I kept waiting for someone to say, “All right, quit screwing around,” but it never happened. Whatever you want to do, whatever you want to try, is OK. Adam works completely differently from everybody else.’ And co-star Eva Mendes said: ‘I’ve been a McKay/Ferrell fan for a long time. A few years ago, the AFI [American Film Institute] asked me my opinion of the greatest movie of all time, and y’know, I could have said The Bicycle Thief, but I said Anchorman. I quote it on a daily basis.’
One of the film’s standouts is Will and Mark arguing about who would win in a fight – a lion or a tuna – prompting Will to show off his random streams of consciousness in an absurdly delightful scene. Wahlberg said about the scene to Cinema Blend: ‘Yeah. Well, I’m just trying to keep a straight face. He’s so out of his mind, in a good way, but with every scene we did we would shoot what was on the page and then spend three or four hours just improvising and playing around. Yeah, you know, we’re getting into this ridiculous argument but, like everything else that I’ve done, I try to play it as real as possible and stay as committed to the situation and the moment no matter how absurd it is.’
Wahlberg loved it so much, he revealed to Cinema Blend: ‘All of it was memorable, we had so much fun everyday. I kept waiting for somebody to say, “Hey, cut the shit. You gotta be serious for a minute, we’re actually making a movie here,” and they never did that. They encouraged me to get crazier and crazier and then when I got to my craziest it was like putting gasoline on a fire. They pushed me to the next level. Probably the most memorable scenes are with me and [Will’s character] Allen and Eva and with [Steve] Coogan, with Coogan in the car was a treat because it’s just us being in a car, on a stage pretending to be me driving around and everybody’s kind of just throwing stuff out there.’
While it was a laugh riot for most audiences, McKay tried to slip some serious content in the film – the end credits are packed with stylish graphics and startling facts about white collar crime. He told Den of Geek: ‘I think I might have forgotten the world at large a little on that, because, from my perspective, when I saw them, I found them really entertaining. I thought, “Oh, these look cool! They look kinda beautiful!” And there’s a magazine in the US, Harper’s, and they have Harper’s Index, which are the numbers, the stats. I’ve always found that to be entertaining, even though they’re jaw-dropping and startling. So, when I saw it, and we played the “Pimps Don’t Cry” song over it, and the “Rage Against the Machine”, I thought, “Wow, these are really cool!” And then when we started getting the reaction of “Oh my God, it becomes a Michael Moore film in the credits”, I was really surprised. I also thought of the financial thing as not really political. We all agree that it happened. But I underestimated the old corporate media in the United States and the right-wing media. So, yeah, we got some complaints on that, but, ultimately, I don’t care. I think they’re cool.’
He added: ‘We were very lucky. This is going to sound like a bit of studio ass-kissing, but it’s absolutely true. Sony is the coolest studio. They are really amazing. I think part of it comes from they’re not an American corporation. They don’t work by quite the same rules. And their studio heads have a lot of autonomy.’
It was a pleasing return of form for Will – with the film knocking Christopher Nolan’s sci-fi hit Inception off the top spot at the US box office. However, there were fears, given the box-office beating given to Land of the Lost. Will’s publicist said at the time: ‘There’s certainly a lot of perceived pressure because the last film did not do well at all. So he’s under the microscope more so that he would be if he was coming off a film that made $100 million or $200 million. It’s been 14 months between the two movies, so hopefully some backlash has subsided and people are excited about the film and the publicity appearances. You hope that stuff and the word of mouth carries.’ He added, ‘Will had a bad misstep with Land of the Lost. Big deal. There are certainly other people who have had a film do poorly and rebound.’ Sony distribution president Rory Bruer said at the time, ‘We’re in Will’s sweet spot. Land of the Lost was more conceptual. The really get-down-and-dirty comedies that Will has been amazing for us in – whether it be Talladega Nights or Step Brothers – we’ve had huge success with.’
Peter Travers from Rolling Stone raved: ‘Take a plot about two NYPD detectives who sit on the sidelines while other cops get all the shootouts and glam headlines. Kick it up a notch by casting Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg as the losers who stumble into the big time. Spice with giddy action from the script by Chris Henchy and director Adam McKay. Then sit back and laugh your ass off. I did. Ferrell and McKay scored with Anchorman, Talladega Nights and Step Brothers, and, with Henchy, they started the influential comedy website Funny or Die. That’s Hall of Fame funny, right there. In The Other Guys, they’re flying on comic helium. OK, the balloon loses altitude from time to time, but Ferrell and Wahlberg are a comic riot. Ferrell is effortlessly uproarious. And watching hardass Wahlberg, in his first starring shot at farce, shake his sillies out is not to be missed. Catch his double and triple takes when the wife Ferrell claims to be embarrassed by turns out to be crazy-sexy Eva Mendes. But there I go giving away the jokes. Don’t let anyone spoil the wildly hilarious surprises. Ferrell and Wahlberg will double your fun. Guaranteed.’
The Evening Standard wrote: ‘Clever is not funny. Stupid’s funny. Determined, persistent, straight up stupid – that’s funny. Strange that so many clever comedians don’t know it. Or maybe they do but they don’t want to look stupid. The Other Guys is the fourth collaboration between Will Ferrell and Adam McKay, following on from Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, and Step Brothers. It’s a buddy cop movie, like 48 Hours, gone a bit funny. Very, actually.’ Empire magazine said: ‘Skewers the action genre while also finding room for sheer madness. We’ve still yet to see the equal of Ron Burgundy, but this latest offering is a wonky yet worthy addition to the McKay/Ferrell pantheon.’
The Independent weren’t as enthused, but noted that it had some good points: ‘Will Ferrell reunites with Adam McKay, director of his most popular work (Anchorman, Talladega Nights), in a comedy-action movie that begins far more engagingly than it ends. Ferrell is partnered with Mark Wahlberg as a pair of middling cops – not the daredevil, pistol-packin’ ones but “the other guys” – who suddenly get a chance to shine when they investigate a huge embezzlement scandal. As long as it sticks with the goofball riffing and the delectable parody of cop machismo by Samuel L. Jackson and Dwayne Johnson, this works up a decent head of steam. Michael Keaton as their captain is slyly amusing, and even Wahlberg, as the angry foil to Ferrell’s unheroic desk jockey, shows unsuspected comic chops (his reaction on meeting the latter’s “crazy hot” wife Eva Mendes is hilariously disbelieving). The laughs dry up, however, once the silly heroics kick in, the mayhem and car chases reducing it to exactly the formulaic twaddle it set out to tease.’
Will was next seen in Megamind. Will said about the process of being in an animated movie: ‘Well, in terms of vocals, I was just trying to go for – he’s this villain who, under different circumstances, could have been the good guy. He’s alienated to the point where he thinks, “I might as well be evil, it’s what I’m good at.” Tom McGrath the director and I, we spoke about how he should be approachable and sweet, and someone you’d root for. And at the same time, I thought, his whole life and demeanour and the way he acts is based on the idea that he thinks he’s very intelligent. That’s where the voice came.’
Asked what his kids thought about him doing an animated comedy, he told Den of Geek: ‘Well, it was interesting, because this is the first movie I’ve done where they have an awareness that I was in it. They couldn’t decipher the fact that I was Megamind, and asked, “Are you in a costume?” I had to explain that it was kind of like a cartoon. It was fun. [It was] the first time they got to go to a premiere, and they got to go to France. The best part about it was, when I asked my three-year-old if he liked it, he was like, “Yeah, I really liked it.” But my six-year-old, he’d seen the trailer and stuff, and he saw the movie and was laughing at the jokes. I asked him, “What did you think?”, and he was like, “Oh, um … you were fine.” [And I said] “Remember you were laughing at the phone and smells like a hero and all these things?”, and he says, “Oh yeah, I know. You were fine.” His attitude was like, “Don’t ask me again, or I’ll have to tell you what I really think.” Tough love!’ Will added: ‘The oldest one is just starting to know. I think because his friends at school say, “I saw your dad.” Last summer, he pulled me aside and said [adopts conspiratorial voice], “I know what you do.” It was like, “Hey, buddy, let me talk to you for a second.” I said, “What is it that I do?”, and he said, “You’re an actor.” And I asked him how he felt about that, and he said, “OK. I’m fine with it.”’
Director Tom McGrath said about the film: ‘I heard it was about a villain who accidentally defeats his nemesis, creates a new hero to battle, and inevitably has to rise up and be the hero himself. And at the centre of it was a love story. Just with that simple pitch, I said, “Wow, that sounds really unique – to tell a story from the villain’s point of view.”’ The film was originally conceived as live action but they decided it would work best as an animation. Producer Lara Breay observed, ‘It was important to us that Megamind shouldn’t just be a parody. There have been a few of those in the past and they haven’t always been particularly successful or funny in our opinion. Besides, we love superhero movies; we would never set out to mock them. What we did want to do was take the audience’s expectations – their deep knowledge of this genre from the hundreds of movies and comic books that have come before – and knowingly upend them to create a story that would be fresh and surprising, even to fans of the genre. Nothing and no one in Megamind is what it first seems, and that leads to a lot of thrills and a lot of laughs.’
Director McGrath says, ‘If you love superhero movies, here’s an entirely new take. We have a lot of fun with all the stereotypical trappings of those films, but I feel we made something new and fresh. And telling it in 3D animation is a big advantage over live-action. When creating an animated film, we can seamlessly blend huge effects and action sequences with intimate character-driven scenes. It’s all integrated. Everything in Megamind is in the realm of computer graphics, where you can push things a little further than you could in live-action and still be right there with the characters. In the superhero movies I see now, everything is slicked up with polycarbon fibre and airbrushed metallic costumes. If there really were superheroes in the world, though, they’d be the biggest celebrities, regardless of the shine on their gadgets.’
He said about the casting of Ferrell: ‘Casting Will Ferrell was key. He has this incredible ability to play a bombastic egomaniac hell-bent on world domination in a way that makes him not only hilarious, but lovable. He shows us the vulnerability and longing that’s behind the deluded buffoon, and you can’t help but root for him.’
The film was another hit for Will, giving him much needed box-office relief following the Land of the Lost flop. But that still didn’t meant he would be playing it safe.