BOBBY Farrelly talks about reuniting with Ben Stiller for the first time since There’s Something About Mary on The Heartbreak Kid and filming some of the more outrageous material…

He also talks about keeping up with the competition in terms of gross-out comedies and why Steven Spielberg’s visit to the set provided a certain amount of embarrassment…

i>The Heartbreak Kid reunites you with Ben Stiller for the first time in eight years, so what was it like working with him again?
Bobby Farrelly: He’s just so darn good. We write something and you hope some guy can come and capture what you were hoping to capture but he takes it to the next level. Right after There’s Something About Mary we were thinking: “We’re going to have to work with Ben again.” But we never had a project that we felt was exactly right for him until this one, The Heartbreak Kid, a story about a guy who goes on his honeymoon and flips for another woman. It’s a tricky story because if you don’t like the guy or understand where he’s coming from the story’s not going to work. But Ben’s one of those actors that you like. People like him because he’s always so darn funny, so it’s great to be back in business with him.

And you get two Stillers for the price of one in this thanks to Jerry [Ben’s father] appearing as well?
Bobby Farrelly: Well, we’d written the character of the dad who is, incidentally, based on our own dad [laughs embarrassed] and we were thinking: “Who can play this juicy role?” We started thinking of all these different actors and then someone said: “Well, what about Ben’s dad?” We thought it made sense, so then it became about whether Ben was happy with that, or whether they’d be good together on screen. But they were great together. And to work with Jerry Stiller was a lot of fun.

There’s a lot of trademark outrageous Farrelly brothers moments in the film, including a couple of sex scenes. How easy or difficult were they to film?
Bobby Farrelly: The sex scenes are outrageous but they were very easy for us to film! It was the actress, Malin Akerman, who was kind of in the middle of it all. But she’s such a brave actress. As she was filming it, it was all we could do to not be laughing on the set. She was a fun, fun girl to work with.

And the scene on the beach where she has to pee on Ben?
Bobby Farrelly: Well, Ben’s just been stung by a jellyfish and you have to urinate on someone when that happens! But she also had to do some things that were like: “Whoa!” I just give her immense credit. Going in, she knew that it was a role that required her to do a lot of these different things but she was fearless. To do comedy really well, you have to just put your ego to one side and not have that voice in your head, saying: “I might look silly if I do this and it doesn’t work.” She didn’t think that way at all.

Michelle Monaghan also gives a lovely performance in the film. What attracted you to her?
Bobby Farrelly: We actually brought Michelle in to read for the Lila role, the bad girl role, but we thought she had such a beautiful, sweet, wonderful energy about her that it felt like she’d be better for the second girl, the sweet one. So that was it. She’s girl next door grounded and she plays the perfect second girl in this movie. The girl that audiences realise is the girl Ben’s character has been waiting for his whole life. It’s just that he had the misfortune to meet her when he’s on honeymoon!

Did you base any of Lila’s stuff on any ex-girlfriend experiences you or Peter had?
Bobby Farrelly: Yes! [laughs] We can’t divulge our sources but it’s taken from a compilation of some of the girls we had met before we met our lovely wives. But I think a lot of people may even look at it and ask: “Why would he [Ben] leave her? She’s a little nutty, but so what?”

Q. What do you like best about working with your brother?
Bobby Farrelly: We share a vision and because there’s two of us we’re able to protect that vision. I think that if you look at other teams that are brothers – whether it’s the Coens, the Wachowskis or the Zuckers – they usually have a distinct stance and I’ve got to believe that’s because there’s two of them. There’s always an element of people trying to get you to water down your product when you’re a filmmaker and being that there’s two of us we kind of hold each other up better. We’re just a little bit stronger.

When There’s Something About Mary came out you were almost the lone guys doing this kind of gross out comedy. Now, there’s a lot more filmmakers – such as Judd Apatow – working in the same field. Do you find that it’s a more competitive playing field?
Bobby Farrelly: When we did There’s Something About Mary we had to really spend a time talking to the studio about whether or not we could even make this comedy and whether there would be a market for it. There had been so many comedies in a row that adhered to adolescent boys and Mary wasn’t – it was an adult comedy and we thought: “It hasn’t been done, it’s fresh ground, so let’s try it.” Now a lot of people are making these kinds of films, so it’s not as fresh. But at the same time it’s still liberating in that you can go for a much bigger gag, as we do in this movie, than you could if we were making it a little bit more for everyone, or for the family.

How about in terms of competing with yourselves? Did you find that you became prisoners of your own reputations?
Bobby Farrelly: We did after we made Me, Myself and Irene, so we went down a different path because of that feeling. So we began to do comedies that weren’t as outlandish and we got very comfortable doing them but it feels good to be back doing this sort of thing again. This is our first R-rated comedy in quite a while and I just think we do it better than we do the other things.

How do you gauge how far is too far in terms of the comedy?
Bobby Farrelly: We just do what we think is funny. We’re not always right and have probably gone too far a lot of times but we put the movie together, we edit it and then we test it. They’ll then tell us if we went too far because we won’t get the reaction that we want. In general, it always surprises us how they go along with us. In general, the audience is receptive to this kind of stuff.

Q. I read an interesting quote from Ben Stiller that suggested you like to show your private parts on set to keep the mood light. Is that true?
Bobby Farrelly: [Laughs] Well, we’re not against that sort of thing, we just want to do it so that we don’t get in trouble with the law. We try and do whatever we can to keep people laughing and it’s always about doing something that they’re not really expecting. So yeah, we find that when everyone’s in a good mood, having fun and the set is light and breezy, the comedy works a lot better. There are days when it’s a little bit more stressful and people are maybe a little tired because they’ve been working too many days in a row and it’s hard to do the comedy on those days. So we always just try and do whatever we can to make work fun! It breaks the ice!

Q. I understand Steven Spielberg paid a visit to the set one day. How did it feel to have him looking over your shoulder?
Bobby Farrelly: Well, it was kind of fun working for DreamWorks because it is a Steven Spielberg company. We saw him once or twice when we were putting the whole project together. But there was one day when we did look over and there he was on the set. The distressing part of it was that we were doing the donkey sequence. I thought: “Why would he come now?” But there’s now a part of me that thinks he thought: “You know what? I don’t know how I’d shoot a donkey sequence, so let’s see how these guys go about doing it!” [laughs] Fortunately, we got that donkey to give that performance in one take, so it was still funny at the time.

How do you get a donkey to perform on cue?
Bobby Farrelly: Well, I don’t want to pull the curtain back too much but let’s just say it was a female donkey with a strap-on penis!

Is there any word on your Three Stooges project?
Bobby Farrelly: I think we’re at the same place we were the last time I told people it was right around the corner! We’d go tomorrow with it but believe it or not, it’s a project we’ve had a very hard time getting financing for. People who are putting up the money think it’ll be hard to market, that it’s for boys and it might not play overseas. There are a lot of questions that people have.

Do you have a cast in mind?
Bobby Farrelly: Well, that’s another one of those things. Not really but we think that of the Moe, Curly and Larry roles, Moe is the lead. He’s the strongest of the three, so we feel that we really need to get a good, strong actor in there. Two of the guys we’ve talked about are Russell Crowe or Benicio Del Toro and let the other guys feed off their strength.

b>Read our review of The Heartbreak Kid

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