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Steve Carell, 'The 40 Year Old Virgin'.
Despite my many years in this biz, this was my first experience
at doing an interview via a teleconference. The process is as
follows: a selection of SA's media go into a room in Adelaide
that's equipped with a camera and a TV screen, linked to a similar
setup somewhere in Melbourne. In the Adelaide room sit nine
journalists. In the Melbourne room sits actor and comedian Steve
Carell, briefly in the country to promote 'The 40 Year Old Virgin'.
We speak to our screen, Steve speaks to his. There's 20 minutes.
We get a couple of questions each.
Now, at the risk of sounding like Journo McWrite-Write, this is a less than ideal situation for my own somewhat more conversational interview style. What's more, Steve Carell is a genius. Sure, his comic turn as retarded weatherman Brick Tamland in 'Anchorman' was scene-stealingly hilarious, and 'The 40 Year Old Virgin' (which he also co-wrote) is surprisingly joyful, not to mention side-splittlingly funny, but my heart belongs to him for one reason: his years as a correspondent on 'The Daily Show', the bitingly satirical, fiercely political and consistently funny US cable "fake news" show hosted by Jon Stewart.
(As an aside: Thanks to the wonders of digital technology I'd just seen Carell's interview on the show - ostensibly to promote the film - in which he and Stewart sat facing each other in silence for an uninterrupted two minutes, before Stewart cleared his throat to hesitantly ask "Er... don't you have a report to submit?"
"No Jon, I don't submit reports any more. I make movies now.")
So in an ideal world I'd have liked the standard 20 minutes on the phone where we can relax, have a chat, talk about his career - and, of course, discuss the movie. But intelligently, you know? Not wasting this oh-so-limited time on jokey questions like, say...
"Are you a virgin?"
I mean, really. What are you, Rove McManus?
"Yes, I am. Next question," Carell snaps, before professionalism takes over and he smiles. "No I'm not. But I will say that I was at one point a virgin, so I do have some experience in this arena."
That's 45 seconds we're not getting back, and that was from one of the better writers. I start to die a little inside as I realise that this is unlikely to be the interview for which I'd hoped.
Carell, on the other hand, is clearly used to this sort of press conference approach and answers the inevitable question about The Chest Waxing Scene with chirpy good humour. "I'm still aching, months and months later. It was real, and if you look closely you can see blood beading to the surface of my chest. It was probably a very ill-advised decision on my part - but I thought it would be funnier. I thought if the audience knows that I'm really having this done, there'll be a certain immediacy to it which will heighten the comedy in the scene. What I didn't realise was that it would also hurt like crazy: it was so much more painful than I thought it would be, and it really didn't grow back for a couple of months. That didn't do great things for my love life with my wife [actress/comedienne Nancy Walls]. She didn't care for that look."
The scene - one of the funniest in the film - was improvised in one take, but Carell explains that most of the film was actually fairly tightly scripted. "We definitely had a structure, but it's a very delicate balance to strike with improvisation versus script: you want to let the actors discover things and play around with the dialogue, but you also have to cover things with camera angles so you need the same lines over and over and over. The scene with Jane Lynch as my manager in the store, when she's offering to deflower me: that was all improvised. In fact, she improvised her audition and we just transcribed it and put it in the movie because it was so funny."
It's my turn, and I ask about the genesis of the film: I'd heard
tell that it had grown out of a sketch, now a scene early in
the film, where Carell's character reveals his inexperience
with women by describing breasts as feeling like bags full of
sand. "Yeah, that was my original pitch to Judd: there was this
guy who's new to the gang, and the other guys were telling these
very raunchy sexual conquest stories, and he feels compelled
to keep up and tell one of his own, but it's clear that he's
out of his element; and having never touched a woman he has
no idea what a woman feels like. And I thought it would be funny
to have a guy with no reference level about women or sex trying
to tell a dirty story and just failing miserably, and getting
called out on it. And to me, that's where the movie starts:
that's where he has to make a decision whether he's going to
crawl back into his shell, or whether he's going to do something
about it."
The process continues, with questions about whether he's seen
much of Australia in the 56 hours total that he's in the country
(no, as it happens) and his lead role in the upcoming movie
version of 'Get Smart', and when my turn comes around again
I ask whether it was difficult to leave 'The Daily Show'. "It
was," Carell sighs. "It was kind of a perfect job. There was
really no reason to leave, it's a really funny, smart show and
I had a lot of friends there, but I'd kinda done everything
I could do on that show, and I wanted to let other people come
in and do stuff as well. But I've left the door open - I still
do the occasional thing from time to time."
And of course, he can still do interviews.
"Oh, that was so much fun. Jon just said to me, before we went on, 'let's try not to talk for as long as we can', that was all we had going in, there was no pre-planned bit at all. And then we spent two or three minutes just staring at each other."
Andrew P Street
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'The 40 Year Old Virgin' is still screening everywhere.
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