The directors, noted Diaz, worked as a team, “bouncing ideas off of each other and both giving directing. You could see why these guys (Stiller, Matt Dillon, Lee Evans) were going to ridiculous lengths to try and win her affection.” We both walked away like, ‘I love that girl.’ I remember some critic somewhere said something like, ‘She gave it the Good Housekeeping seal of approval.’ She grounded it because she was so lovely. “We did have her at the top of the list,” said Bobby Farrelly. Earl Brown), but the homeless and her eccentric, severely sunburned friend Magda ( Lin Shaye) “My mother said, ‘What was it, Cindy?’ She goes, ‘When the girl has the in her hair.’ I remember thinking this could be a big hit.”ĭiaz, who received a New York Film Critics Circle award for her work, was the key to the film’s success, the brothers said, because she perfectly captured Mary’s sweetness and kindness not only with the intellectually disabled Warren (W.
“Cindy yelled to my mother, ‘Marion, I loved the movie, but you know what my favorite part was?’” noted Peter Farrelly.
Their neighbor Cindy, a longtime friend of their mother, was invited to the premiere. That is, until the movie’s premiere in Rhode Island. “When we made the movie, we didn’t think it would be for everybody,” Peter Farrelly said. No matter how shocking the comedy is, there is so much that is inherently good about the story and the characters that really appeals to people and it makes the laughter at the jokes a little more forgivable.” “I trusted Bobby and Peter, obviously, because they are so hilarious, but when we came up with the visual to the joke, it made me realize how right they were.”īesides, she added, “Peter and Bobby have such heart in all of their movies. “At first, I had questions because you never know how something like that can go since it had never been done before,” noted Diaz in an e-mail interview. “She said, ‘Absolutely.’ But on the day, she’s like, ‘I’m having second thoughts about this. The brothers had asked Diaz if she was comfortable with everything in the scene.
We’re not doing it to just shock people.’ We were trying to make people laugh.” If it doesn’t get huge laughs, we’re not going to leave it in. “We were like, ‘This could definitely be way over the edge. “It’s all loosely based on things that happened.”īut he did reveal that they didn’t know if they were going too far with the joke. “Look, the kid in eighth grade, I could tell his story, but I can’t give away all my secrets,” Farrelly said. He was less open about whether the comedy’s best and raunchiest scene involving Ted and Mary exchanging “hair gel” is based on an actual event in their lives. “When they told us, we were laughing so hard, we were like ‘Oh, my God.’ So we just worked it into the story.” His parents never told them the story until years later because they wanted to save the kid embarrassment. My dad, who was a doctor, actually had to go in and say, ‘Hey, kid. “One of the kids went up and he zipped himself up. “My parents were upstairs,” Farrelly said. They remembered the time when their younger sister had a group of fellow eighth graders over to the house to listen to records in the basement.