Farrellys with taste

Bobby and Peter try to figure how mean is too mean

Jim Carrey, Bobby and Peter Farrelly

NEW YORK -- Are there limits to bad taste, even in a Farrelly brothers movie? In one scene in Me, Myself & Irene, Hank, the id-like half of Jim Carrey's character, actually apologizes: to the albino Whitey (Michael Bowman) for calling him a giant Q-tip. In fact, Peter and Bobby Farrelly submit their films to far more audience testing than the average studio release gets, and they're sensitive to the fine line between outrageous humor and mean-spirited cruelty.

"We're huge believers in test meetings, and so we do five, six, seven of our own tests before we do the studio tests," says Peter Farrelly. "We go to colleges. We live in the Boston area. And they tell us how far we go. There was a scene at the very end of the movie after Charlie pulls the bandage off his chin and the sons say, `Look dad, you know, now you could blow your nose and wipe your butt at the same time.' And they laugh and he says, `Ha, ha, ha, ha . . . yeah, well, your mother fucked a midget.' And the audience laughed, but afterward they said, `You know, you should cut that thing. That was mean.' And also, as Bob pointed out afterward, what about the midget sitting in the audience watching this movie? It just seems like it crossed the line for us; it was mean-spirited, so we cut it."

"We approach a movie," adds Bobby Farrelly, "by asking ourselves every 10 minutes, what does the audience expect in the next 10 minutes? Then we try to not give them that but to not disappoint, that's the key. You know, you can refuse to give them something and piss them off, but you have to satisfy them as the movie goes on. It does become more and more expected for us to have a certain style of humor. But we're going to veer off. We're not going to keep doing this. It's not going to be the same tone. I don't want a Something About Mary 3, you know."

"We're not gonna run up and do Interiors, though," notes Peter. "I think it's like Jim [Carrey] going from doing a big comedy to doing something more dramatic, he's going to lose a little of his audience because everybody wants to see him doing the comedies. It would probably be like that for us. So we don't see ourselves doing that right now."

In fact, their next project is called Shallow Hal. "He's so shallow," says Bobby, "he looks at girls only for their . . . he'll only consider girls based on their beauty. He goes to a hypnotist who teaches him to see inner beauty and so he falls for this girl who, by all accounts, is not what one would consider beautiful but he sees her as the most beautiful woman who ever lived. He sees her as Gwyneth Paltrow; that's where she comes into the story. Now everyone else is looking at a girl who like, weighs 400 pounds or, you know, is very unattractive. But in his eyes, she's the most gorgeous woman who ever lived. So he falls for her and he learns to see people on a different level. It's a bit of a fairy tale; it's a really nice, nice movie with a lot of heart."

"That, to us, is the hardest part," says Peter. "Creating a story that has a lot of heart and yet it's not so obvious that you're like, `Oh, yeah, I'm going to buy that . . . ' I guess our sensibility is different from the average person's but the main thing we're trying to do, when we start a new story, is to create a character that you can like enough so that we can hang the gags on it. The jokes, for us, are the easy part. We do those just for fun, just to lighten the mood, but it's really the character that challenges you to create."

-- P.K.

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