Will Ferrell is sitting across from a camera, laughing at his own jokes before he even finishes setting them up. ‘Is it sad that I laugh that much at my own stuff?’ he asks, then answers himself: ‘Yeah.’ For anyone who has spent the better part of two decades quoting Anchorman, Elf, Talladega Nights, and Step Brothers back at friends who were already mid-quote themselves, this is the closest thing to a director’s commentary that actually sounds like a person talking. Ferrell walks through the scenes that defined his run, and the production details behind them are as absurd as the films themselves.
Thirty-five setups, one day, 100 degrees in downtown LA
The Anchorman street brawl remains one of the most chaotic sequences ever assembled under a studio comedy budget. Ferrell puts the scale plainly: somewhere between 30 and 35 different setups, a main film unit and a stunt unit running simultaneously in downtown Los Angeles in the middle of July, on a day when the thermometer hit 100 degrees. A scene that should have required three days was compressed into one. There is a man on fire in the background. Someone gets dragged by a net on horseback, which Ferrell notes was ‘kind of an homage to early Planet of the Apes.’ Brick Tamland, played by Steve Carell, is holding a hand grenade. The logic for how he obtained it is never explained, and that is entirely the point.
Ferrell and Adam McKay went into Anchorman, by his own account, with a specific creative philosophy: follow every comedy idea all the way through without letting anyone say it was too long, too strange, or too senseless. ‘It may not make sense, but it’s just funny,’ was the working standard. Nobody wanted to make it. Nobody understood why it would work. ‘We just felt like we were playing with the house’s money,’ Ferrell says, ‘and let’s just make the craziest film we can because we may never be allowed to make another movie ever again.’
A mental hospital in Vancouver and a camera operator who couldn’t stop laughing
The department store scene in Elf, the one where Buddy sprints across the floor screaming about Santa’s arrival, was never rehearsed. Ferrell says he never told director Jon Favreau how he planned to play it. The crew’s reaction wasn’t a big laugh but more of a quiet bewilderment: Will’s acting crazy, what’s going on. What Ferrell did not mention until now is where that toy store actually was. The interior of the department store was shot inside an old mental hospital in Vancouver, Canada.
The Talladega Nights dinner table scene, the one where Ricky Bobby insists on praying to the baby Jesus in golden fleece diapers, took an entire day to shoot for roughly two and a half minutes of finished film. The camera operator was laughing so hard the camera was physically bouncing. He called cut on himself, apologized, and said he didn’t think the take was usable. Ferrell has since been sent excerpts of that scene used in actual church sermons. ‘That stuff’s just really cool,’ he says.
The Jeopardy sketches with Alex Trebek came from an impersonation Ferrell had been doing at the Groundlings years before SNL picked it up. He is honest about his own limitations as a mimic: ‘I wasn’t as gifted a technician as Daryl Hammond, who could do a voice letter perfect.’ The pleasure of the Trebek character, he explains, was showing a famously composed man being driven to the edge by Sean Connery’s deliberate misreadings and Norm MacDonald’s inexplicable foam cowboy hat. One sketch ended with Ferrell screaming at Norm in character. During the costume change afterward, Norm pulled him aside and asked, quietly, if Ferrell was actually upset with him. ‘I was like, no, Norm, I’m just playing a character. That’s how good an actor I am.’ He pauses. ‘But I’ll always remember Norm thinking I was really upset with him.’
The golf ball Lonnie Hawkins talks to
The detail from The Reluctant Traveler that Ferrell lingers on longest is a small ritual: his character Lonnie Hawkins talks to his golf ball, a habit producer David Gordon Green apparently pitched early in development. Ferrell finds it genuinely plausible. ‘I bet there are some golfers who talk to a golf ball. It seems to make sense.’
The tuxedo t-shirt line from Talladega Nights that opens the whole retrospective, Ricky Bobby’s preferred image of Jesus, is the one Ferrell quotes to himself first, laughs at alone, and then uses to anchor everything that follows. He still finds it funny. Of course he does.
