| The Best Will In The World |
Comedy hero Will Ferrell shot to fame with the brilliant Elf and Old School. But, with the release of the self-penned Anchorman: The Legend Of Ron Burgundy, he upped his funny-man routine. The toast of Hollywood’s frat-pack, he’s beating buddies Vince, Owen and Ben at their own game. So, with our heads firmly bowed to the king of comedy, we get the buzz on latest release, Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby…
NASCAR fans are notoriously enthusiastic about their sport so you ran the risk of offending a lot of people with this film. Is it difficult to keep the comedy edgy and funny in those circumstances?
Yeah, there was a fine line we had to tow because the fanaticism of NASCAR is kind of unparalleled. So, we obviously thought of the idea as something that was fun to make fun of but we also wanted to celebrate at the same time. Those are the two things we were trying to straddle. I like that word; straddle.
You spent time with driving crews too, in preparation?
Yes, we went to Richard Pederwee Driving Experience, which I highly recommend if you like to drive fast. We learnt how to drive the cars, it was myself and John C Reilly and Sacha Baron Cohen and Adam our director. They take you on what’s called a ride-along, where a professional driver takes you and you sit next to them and they take you about 170 miles an hour, just to scare you. And it works! We were so frightened we didn’t want to drive by ourselves, which was the next step. We were so vocal about how scared we were that the instructor asked us to please shut up because we were scaring the actual paying customers. We did pit crew school; basically we did far too much research for a comedy of this level.
With this film in particular, you’re the only guy who can’t get the joke, because if Ricky realises just how dumb he is then it’s not a joke. Is it hard to play that consummate obliviousness?
No, I kind of love that as a character trait. Both Ron Burgundy and Ricky Bobby both share the same thing in that we love writing characters that have what we call unearned confidence. There’s no reason for them to be as confident as they are and they think they’re the best or the brightest. And then you slowly see that they’re somewhat self conscious and it seeps through that they’re very vulnerable characters.
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