You can get so many stories out of road trips. Find out other people’s annoyances, breaking points, etc.
Peter: About 10 years ago, Charlie [Charles Wessler, producer of all of the Farrelly Brothers’ films] and I decided to take a train across America, from Boston to LA. We got a sleeper car, the best thing you could get. I was picturing martinis and women and just a great time — but it was fucking awful! Awful! The windows don’t open and it was a smoking car — I don’t mind smoke in bars — but I was nauseated by the smoke. At night, [Charlie] and I snuck out through a door to a car we weren’t supposed to be in, the one in the back with the open door —
Bobby: The hobo car?
Peter: Yeah, the hobo car. There were like 20 people on the outside portion trying to get fresh air. So we were jammed together. Horribly claustrophobic. The next morning we pulled into Kansas City, “next stop Kansas City, five minutes in Kansas City” and I looked at Charlie, “I gotta get off here.” So we got off and had a steak — there’s great food in Kansas City — and flew home to Los Angeles. It was spur of the moment —
Bobby: Another thing where the romantic notion of something actually just sucks: taking a train across America!
Peter: They stop all the time, too. [There’s probably a minute of Peter imitating the engine of a train, the conductor pulling into “Quad Cities”, how he didn’t have leg room in their “deluxe” cab and Bobby laughing at everything].
I’ve heard that Kansas City is supposed to be a pretty hip place these days. Actually, going back to you saying that Boise was a city on the “up-and-up” — when I was younger, the big population boom was people moving from California because all these computer factories were opening up in Boise, and I remember this anti-California sentiment spreading throughout the suburbs, you’d see bumper stickers: “Go Back to California!” —
Peter: Really?
Yeah, but I thought California just made it better. All the sudden there was more stuff I was interested in. How was your transition from Rhode Island to California?
Peter: I always idolized California. There’s the sunshine and pretty girls —
Bobby: He was an LA Dodgers fan and a UCLA Bruins fan growing up. He was in a California state of mind.
Peter: Yeah, well, New Year’s Day we’d watch the Rose Bowl . We’d see the cheerleaders and the sun — we’d be shivering and shoveling snow and it was dark at 3:30 in the afternoon — and I’d look at Bobby and say, “that’s where we’re going!” … Later, I’d been living in New York and New York is like a tight box. I came to Los Angeles and I did not know where to go. I blame my writing partner Bennett (Yellin). His parents are Orthodox Jews and they didn’t know any cool places to go. I lived with them for three months, and I was like, “Where the fuck do you go?”
Bobby: They were like, ‘I hear that the Red Onion is good!’ [laughing].
[Note: a Los Angeles Times article turns up that the Red Onion restaurant and disco plagued elder citizens of Marina del Rey with all the ‘honking’ and ‘tire squealing’ that the banquet hall attracted until 1994]
Well, I’d love to chat more geography but we’ll probably have to get a little about this movie …
Bobby: And now your time’s up!
[laughs] Why revisit Harry and Lloyd 20 years later?
Peter: We always wanted to revisit them. This is the one movie of ours that we wanted to do a sequel to. We left them as we had found them at the beginning of this movie. We had no growth. They’re still unemployed, no marriages, they went back to Rhode Island, they’re still friends. But we didn’t want to do it as our second movie because we didn’t want to be the Dumb and Dumber guys. So we always figured we’d get back to it around or third or fourth movie, but then Jim (Carrey) got so busy, and then he didn’t want to do it. Jeff (Daniels) always wanted to do it again.
Bobby: Yep! Bless him.
Peter: And about five years ago, Jim called me. He was on the road, he was in a hotel room and he turned on the TV and Dumb and Dumber was starting. He said he watched the whole thing and he called us and said, “I gotta do another one of these.” I remember he didn’t say how fucking funny it was, it was more like “there’s so much love between those guys. It makes me miss Jeff, it makes me miss you guys. I just love the feeling I get from watching this movie. We gotta do another one.” And that’s what really got the ball rolling.
[Note: CraveOnline brought this up to Jim Carrey at the press conference. Before responding, Carrey picked up one of 20 audio recorders in front of him and took it to the corner to give an exclusive answer to “Eric E” to the delight of the room. Then he returned to the conference table —
Jim Carrey: I don’t remember the genesis of these things. I’d been listening to fans for a long time. I did call them (the Farrelly Brothers), certainly, to say “We need to work together again. Period’ I love that group of guys. As you get older you value these things and think ‘I wanna be with the gang again.’ I wanna hang out with him [puts his hand on Jeff Daniels’ shoulder] and hang out with the Farrelly’s. It’s just really about that and going out to have fun. And do something dumb. The audience who saw the original — as kids — has grown up and now there’s a new audience to have fun with.
I don’t know if that answers the question, but I’m making sound right now and that’s the important thing.
