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"The Heartbreak Kid 2007" First Look In Theaters October 5, 2007
In "The Heartbreak Kid," single and indecisive, Eddie (Ben Stiller) begins dating the incredibly sexy and seemingly fabulous Lila. Upon the urging of his father and best friend, Eddie proposes to her after only a week, fearing this may be his last chance at love, marriage, and happiness. However, while on their honeymoon in sunny Mexico, Lila reveals her true beyond-awful nature and Eddie meets Miranda, the woman he realizes to be his actual soul mate. Eddie must keep his new, increasingly horrid wife at bay as he attempts to woo the girl of his dreams.
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Wild About Movies Grade: D FYI - "The Heartbreak Kid 2007" Movie is a reinvention or update of the 1972 Neil Simon film of the same name, according to Paramount Pictures.
"The Heartbreak Kid" “I’ve got to be honest here. I don’t think it’s possible for a guy to go on his honeymoon, fall in love with another woman and have it all end happily.” Four years ago, when Peter Farrelly heard about an updated “The Heartbreak Kid” script, his initial reaction was to pass on the project. “’The Heartbreak Kid’ is one of my all-time favorite movies,” says Farrelly. “My first instinct was ‘no way.’ I didn’t want to do it.” But after watching the movie again, he saw how readily the story would lend itself to gags, hijinks and assorted other Farrelly-isms. The original film, made in 1972, was based on a short story by Bruce Jay Friedman adapted by Neil Simon and starring Charles Grodin and Cybill Shepherd. “With Scot Armstrong and Leslie Dixon’s script, the thing that fascinated us and really got our attention was that they had flipped it around. In this one, Eddie marries the beautiful Cybill Shepherd character, goes on his honeymoon and then meets a woman who’s more his speed, a more down-to-earth, girl-next-door type. That made it a more complex story, I thought.” Ben Stiller, who plays the title role in the new film, is also a huge fan of the original “The Heartbreak Kid.” “It’s a classic,” says the actor. “It’s just a really funny movie, and I thought we had a chance to do something a little different. There is no improving the original. This is a different movie.” One of the major challenges for both the filmmakers and their star was making Eddie, a guy who ditches his wife on their honeymoon, sympathetic. For Bobby Farrelly, Stiller himself is the key to keeping the audience on Eddie’s side. “Ben makes Eddie a sympathetic character,” says the director. “You understand where he’s coming from, and hopefully you root for him. Once you want good things to happen to him, we can get away with the big jokes that we like to pull.” “I’m married to the girl of my dreams, I’ve got the next three weeks off, I’m road-tripping down to Cabo – if I’m dreaming, Mac, do not wake me up.”
“The Heartbreak Kid” marks the first reunion for the Farrellys and Ben Stiller since “There’s Something About Mary” catapulted their respective careers into the stratosphere eight years ago. “We’ve thought of Ben for other roles, but every time we came up with a movie he’s either been unavailable or he didn’t like it,” says Peter. “This one he really flipped for, and we were obviously thrilled to have him.” “He’s the best reactor in all of Hollywood,” adds Bobby. “You can do all sorts of crazy things to him and the way he takes it is just hysterical. He’s also a really thorough actor. He thinks things through and he comes with a take on how that day is going to go, which is a real plus for directors. He has ideas about wardrobe, where people should sit in a scene; he’s extremely hands-on. But at the same time he is open to trying new things. After a take he might say, ‘Wow, that’s it,’ and not do anything to tweak it because it’s so good. Other times he’ll say, ‘That’s really good, but let’s try it a little bit more somber, or a bit happier,’ that kind of thing. His having such a strong point of view is a big help to us.” Bradley Thomas, who has produced every film the Farrelly brothers have made, believes there’s a basic misconception about comic actors. “People think that they show up on the set and they are just funny,” says Thomas. “That’s not how it really is. With a lot of the comics, they’re very, very serious. Ben is a very serious guy. He probably cares more than any actor I’ve ever worked with.” Malin Akerman, who plays Lila, the spurned wife, says working with Stiller was an amazing experience. “You don’t have to act much, you just kind of react to someone who’s that good. We were able to banter back and forth and sort of go off-script. We have a similar sarcasm, so it worked out really well.” Akerman is equally enthusiastic about working with the Farrellys. “I would go all the way to Egypt just to work with them again,” she says. “They’re just so cool and laid-back; they’re just a couple dudes having a great time who just can’t believe they get to do this as their job. But they’re great at this kind of comedy and they know how to get it out of you. They kind of mimicked it for me and then I had to try it in a girl’s body.” “You think your wife’s a nutcase because, on your honeymoon in a tropical paradise, she’s singing a lot, wanting to have sex around the clock and accidentally she got a little too much sun?” - Doc
Without studio pressure to feature an A-list star as Lila, the Farrellys were able to cast a wide net. They tested over 60 actresses before finding Akerman. “We found the best one,” says producer Thomas. “Her performance is just a tour de force. She is, I can honestly say, our greatest discovery. It’s a very demanding role. You have to be extremely likable and sweet, and also kind of psychotic. The whole movie hinged on her being brilliant and she’s ten times better than what we thought. She’s a genius.” “Malin is a real discovery,” agrees Bobby Farrelly. “She’s a gifted comedienne and really, really surprised us. We knew she was pretty, we knew she was a good actress, had good timing skills, but we had no idea that she could hit the comedic high notes that the part called for. She made the character so much better than we had even envisioned.” He even goes as far as to compare Akerman with some of the most acclaimed comic actors of our time. “We’ve worked with Bill Murray and Jim Carrey. You give them a role and you’re just stunned at how much better they make it than you had even hoped; they knock it out of the park. That’s what she’s done here. She’s done things with a grace and comedic timing we didn’t even imagine.” Peter Farrelly thinks Akerman’s portrayal may persuade some audience members to root for Lila, who he calls a “crazy, wild, beautiful nutcase.” “We tried to be very fair to Lila, because we didn’t want her to be very nice in the beginning and then just turn evil,” says Peter. “She just grows increasingly annoying, but in a way that some people in the audience won’t actually be annoyed by. I’m sure there’s going to be a group of guys who are like saying, ‘Eddie, don’t leave her, she’s spectacular.’ But she’s just not for Eddie.” Akerman impressed the entire company by committing to acts that could only be conceived by the Farrellys. “I had moments when I couldn’t believe what I was doing,” she says. “It’s one thing to read the script and have a good laugh, but another when you have to do that part. I have to put on a merkin (a hair wig for private parts) and pull down my pants and pretend to pee on Ben Stiller with the camera right in my crotch. It’s not the most comfortable position to be in.” The blonde beauty had to put her vanity aside for another essential part of the film. When Lila gets a severe sunburn, the makeup crew created a hideously realistic look for her. “My skin is peeling and they put some boils on me and I have blisters on my hands and it makes me look so unattractive and un-sexy,” she says. “It’s the last thing a man wants to see on his honeymoon – some creature reaching in for a kiss.” Stiller was very impressed with his co-star’s gung-ho attitude. “She’s hilarious,” he says. “She had to do a lot of crazy things and really be okay with putting herself out there. She has this horrible sunburn for a lot of the movie and has to bare parts of her body, and she’s just a real sport.” “This girl Miranda, Mac – who I had the horrible misfortune to meet on my honeymoon - She’s the one!” - Eddie
Michelle Monaghan plays Miranda, the “other woman,” portrayed by Cybill Shepherd in the 1972 Neil Simon version of “The Heartbreak Kid.” “She’s the voice of reason,” says Bobby Farrelly. “She’s the one that all the wackiness sort of bounces off. She’s like the Mary of this movie - an ideal, beautiful woman that you wait your whole life to meet.” Stiller says of his co-star: “She’s the most likable person; sweet and just genuinely fun, and that personality is what the character is in the movie. I have to fall in love with her very quickly and the audience has to believe that I would go for her and she’s the right person. She has that naturally.” Monaghan’s background is as much of a throwback as that of her character, notes Peter Farrelly. “She came out to Hollywood from the cornfields of Iowa, the whole thing,” he says. “She’s a great talent who is girl-next-door beautiful. She feels like an old-time movie star from the ‘40s, which is a dream come true for this role. She’s a movie star.” The actress says her favorite scene was one in which she falls back over a wall into the ocean. “It was so much fun. I always like to do physical things like that. And I really liked working with Ben and having Jerry there as well. It reminded me of an old-school comedy.” Casting Eddie’s father was probably the easiest choice the filmmakers had to make. They brought in Ben’s real-life dad, veteran comedian Jerry Stiller, who had already appeared with his son in “Zoolander” and “Heavy Weights.” “It was a great honor to work with Jerry,” says Bobby Farrelly. “We’ve never worked with him before, and always thought the world of him. To have Jerry actually playing Ben’s dad was an easy sell. “He is one of those guys, you just look at him and you want to laugh,” says Bobby. “It’s a gift. When you meet him and talk to him, you are instantly in the mood to laugh. He’s fun, he’s fearless, and he’s a real trooper. He’ll work anyone under the table; he just keeps going.” The elder Stiller was delighted to join the cast. “When I saw “There’s Something About Mary,” I thought it was one of the funniest movies of all time,” says Jerry Stiller. “The Farrellys know what’s funny. They think on their feet. While you’re doing your scene, they’ll give you something that will make it funnier. I work from the inside of the character and I never try to be funny. That’s not my style. When I have a director who understands what’s going on inside, they can enhance what I’m doing.” Bobby says that Jerry Stiller’s character, Doc, is loosely based on his and Peter’s own father. “He’s supposed to be giving us words of wisdom and all, and you know it’s in there, but the things that stick with you are the audacious things he says.” Working with his dad, Ben Stiller felt the pressure was off him to be funny, and it just came naturally. “He’s just hilarious,” he says. “He’s so unique and he does his thing and since he’s my father, it’s there already. I didn’t really have to act. “He steals every scene, which is exactly what you want,” he continues. “He cracks me up all the time. He’s just funny. He’s a funny person, and he’s a lovable person. He’s just a great guy.” Jerry has equally high praise for his son as a colleague. “Ben is a generous actor,” he says. “Generosity allows the other person to relax so they discover and go further than what is on paper. He’s fast, he thinks fast, and you want to be as good as him. It’s not easy to do that, but he allows the space for the other actor to come in.” Akerman says of the Stillers: “They’re so cute together. Jerry is the sweetest man I’ve ever met. You just want to smoosh him—in the nicest way. It’s just that he’s so polite and Ben is so polite. I love seeing family together like that.” The Farrellys turned to comedian Carlos Mencia for the role of Tito Hernandez, a free-spirited hotel employee. “We needed a guy who sold the Mexican flavor,” says Bobby Farrelly. “He’s got so much energy and bravado, and he really knocked it out of the park for us.” For his part, Mencia says he wasn’t sold right away. “It’s very embarrassing for me to be this person. But they liked my flavor. And once they showed me how much money I would make I said holy— I would love to be in it!” Stiller found himself calling Mencia by his character’s name, Tito, even when the cameras weren’t rolling. “He’s got this incredible wig and a huge moustache. When he puts it on I feel like he’s another person. He’ll show up to the set as Carlos Mencia, and then when he comes out to the scene, it’s like Uncle Tito’s here. Uncle Tito’s in the house.” THERE’S SOMETHING ABOUT THE FARRELLY BROTHERS Peter and Bobby Farrelly began their careers as salesmen: Peter worked for a shipping line and Bobby invented a round beach towel called Sun Spot that allowed sunbathers to change position as the sun moved without repositioning their towels. (P.S. - It wasn’t a big seller.) Neither brother has ever taken a class in screenwriting or directing (though Peter has an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University). Instead, the siblings’ filmmaking passion was fueled by dissatisfaction with what they were seeing in the theaters. “We used to go to the movies and we’d come out and say why didn’t they do it this way?” recalls Bobby. Their first efforts at screenwriting were a little too “non-mainstream,” according to Bobby, and the major movie studios showed no interest in them until they made their first low-budget independent movie, “Dumb and Dumber.” “Everyone in town had already passed on it. They said we’d never get stars to play such dumb guys,” says Bobby. “Agents didn’t want to give it to their actors. But we thought, ‘It’s funny and we’ll make it cheap’ and we cast ourselves as directors. We didn’t know what we were doing, but we were lucky enough to get Jim Carrey interested and his career just happened to be taking off. Somewhere along the way they forgot to fire us.” The comedy, which starred Carrey and Jeff Daniels as a pair of likable half-wits on a cross-country adventure, grossed more than $340 million worldwide and helped the filmmakers develop a loyal audience for their boyish humor, outlandish characters and sweet, but raunchy, comedy. The Farrellys say that they rarely butt heads during a production, perhaps because they each have defined roles in the filmmaking process: Bobby is more likely to be found behind the monitor checking for the perfect shot, while Peter works with the actors to get the perfect take. “Peter and I have always worked together,” says Bobby. “We don’t really know any other way, and we never look at it like we’re competing with each other, or say, ‘Jeez, I wish I got to do that.’ We throw ego aside and say, there’s two of us here, and hopefully between the two of us we can make it better than either one of us would have done alone.” While the number of successful directing teams can probably be counted on one hand with fingers to spare, according to Peter there is strength in numbers, especially when your films tend to push the comedic envelope: “People sometimes ask ‘can you really do that?’ And when you hear that question enough, you start to think ‘am I crazy? What am I doing?’ But when you have someone by your side who’s in agreement with you, you hold each other up. That’s the real advantage we have.” Stiller says working with the brothers is like no other experience in the movie business. “It’s like a party a lot of the time. They are very loose and they like to have a good time. They’re very sweet guys who love to laugh and they have this sort of connection as brothers where they know how to finish each other’s sentences. They are on the same wavelength.” While most of the brothers’ onscreen jokes are carefully planned out, the directors also are open to improvisation and spontaneity, which creates an atmosphere of camaraderie - and no-holds-barred hijinks - on the set. “They like to show their private parts,” says Stiller. “They derive a lot of pleasure from that. Now, certain people can go to jail for that, but on a Farrelly brothers’ movie you really can’t not have that happen to you. They have this joke where they’re like, ‘Do you know what time it is?’ And something’s sticking out of their pants.” Once the cameras start to roll, however, the Farrellys are all business. “That’s when they really do what they do best,” continues Stiller. “Sometimes they’ll throw out a whole scene, or they’ll use just a couple lines or come up with a whole new joke. They discover things as they are happening.” To convey his vision for the actors’ performances, Peter prefers to act out the scenes himself, which caught Carlos Mencia, who plays sleazy hotel employee Uncle Tito, off-guard. “He didn’t just say it to me, ‘Tito, do this,’” recalls Mencia. “He pretended that he was me and said ‘You go like this,’ and then he started doing my lines for me. I am looking at him and I am thinking, ‘You are not Tito, I am Tito. Do not be like Tito.’ But it is actually very beautiful that he feels that close to the actors. I was looking at myself through the eyes of somebody else. It was pretty phenomenal.” “The Heartbreak Kid” is the first R-rated Farrelly brothers movie since 2000’s “Me, Myself & Irene.” This time, they went for broke and made what Bobby calls a “real bona fide adult sex comedy.” “We get into some territory that we haven’t done before,” says the director. “Lila and Eddie are coming from two different degrees of knowledge about how to have sex, and what sex is. Malin is just outrageous in this role and Ben’s reactions to her are priceless. I think that’s going to get a lot of attention.” “It’s the same tone as ‘Mary,’ which was probably our most fun movie to watch with an audience,” he continues. “People were just laughing and laughing hard. I think they’re going to be doing it on this one, too. It’s dark subject matter, but you do root for Eddie. The people in it are so appealing and attractive, and I think we do have a couple of big jokes that’ll pull through. It feels good to be back making R-rated comedies. I really think it’s what we do best. It’s not meant for everyone, but if people are looking for a raucous, adult comedy, this is the one.” Adds Peter Farrelly: “I don’t think there’s ever been a sex scene like this in a comedy before. It's groundbreaking. We were pretty much biting our lips to keep from laughing because of what they were doing. When you see a comedy, the sex scene is always pulled up short and we decided not to. It’s more like the French tradition. French comedies have sex wall-to-wall and that’s sort of what this is. The PG-13 rating has some constraints. This one we went wild on.” According to Peter, one reason the brothers took a break from making R-rated films was the pressure they felt to live up to audience expectations. “We felt like we were at a ceiling and people were coming to see how we could outdo ourselves. It was very hard to do, because it was expected. The thing about ‘Mary’ that was great was that nobody saw it coming. “But after six or seven years away from the game, the audience doesn’t know what to expect from us now,” Peter adds. “And that’s why we decided to do this. We thought since we’re R-rated, we might as well go to the limits of R-ratedness. I think it’s going to sneak up on a few people.” That daring attitude is what reeled Stiller in. “I haven’t done a movie like this since the last time we worked together,” says the actor. Every Farrelly brothers set includes numerous relatives and friends working both in front of and behind the camera. Guys like video assist operator James “Sporty” Ahern, who has worked with the Farrellys on every movie since “Dumb and Dumber” and who has known Peter Farrelly since they were kids together in Little League. “I entertain them when they are under pressure,” says Ahern. “They don’t like to yell and scream at the crew. Some people do that, but they’ll yell and scream in the corner, then come out and work with us.” Ahern works only with the Farrellys. “I’m not a Hollywood type guy, but they bring me into this world and it’s been fun. How can you ever define 40 years of friendship? You just can’t.” “We give our camera crew and all those guys all the autonomy in the world,” says Bobby. “We don’t know anything about what they’re doing; we just know how it looks on the monitor. We have no knowledge of lenses, or angles or that sort of thing. We just know what we like to see, and what we need to get into the editing room.” “The Heartbreak Kid” marked the first time the Farrellys had ever shot on a Hollywood movie set. “While we were there, Stephen Spielberg would come walking on the set and sit down next to us at the monitors. That was a real treat,” says Bobby. After a week in San Francisco and six weeks in L.A., the crew finished off in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, taking over the four-star Esperanza resort. “It’s a magical place,” says Bobby. “It’s been our best location ever, no question, and just a blast for everyone in the crew.” The Farrellys’ signature humor made comedy history with unforgettable comic set pieces like Cameron Diaz’s infamous hair gel scene in “There’s Something About Mary” and Jim Carrey’s unsuccessful attempt at killing a cow in “Me, Myself & Irene.” They can be counted on to hilariously capture taboo moments in family and couple relationships, where boogers, farts, private parts, bodily functions, bitch slapping, witty one-liners and stupid pet nicknames are commonplace. “We want to entertain, we want to surprise, we don’t want to be predictable,” says Bobby. “We don’t want the audience to ever get a little bit ahead of us where they feel like, ‘Oh, I know this kind of scene. I’ve seen this before.’” Ben Stiller knows that people expect a certain amount of irreverence from a Farrelly brothers movie, but he says “The Heartbreak Kid” goes much deeper. “It’s really a combination of interesting characters who are not quite as you expected and a story that has a lot of heart. That said, hopefully this is one of those movies you’ll go to and laugh your socks off.”
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