Peter Farrelly is a terrible planner.
The director, who made hit comedies “Dumb and Dumber” and “There’s Something About Mary” with his brother Bobby before winning the Best Picture Oscar for the more serious, based-on-a-true-story “Green Book,” said he has never really plotted his career. Noting that he has recently returned to silly comedies, including the new Prime Video release “Balls Up,” he added that giving him credit for a deliberate shift back to his earlier work would be overstating things.
“I do what the universe brings me, honestly, and the universe brought this. [Skydance’s] Don Granger sent me this script. He goes, ‘What do you think of this? It’s way out there.’ And I was, like, ‘It’s hilarious. I love this,’” Farrelly said. “It’s Paul Wernick and Rhett Reese who wrote ‘Zombieland,’ another movie I love, and ‘Deadpool.’ And they’re just good writers. So it was no more. I didn’t plan to go, ‘I have to go do a hard-R movie,’ but when I saw it, I knew I have to go do a hard-R movie.”
And, indeed, “Balls Up” is a hard-R movie. It follows a pair of condom salesmen – Brad (Mark Wahlberg) and Elijah (Paul Walter Hauser), who devise a new type of condom that fits over your penis and testicles. Somehow, this is just the beginning of the madness. It also involves the Brazilian World Cup, a charismatic drug lord played by Sacha Baron Cohen and a group of militant environmentalists. It also, like many of Farrelly’s movies, has a road trip element.
Farrelly said that others have pointed out that many of his movies feature road trips.
“I guess I like the road. I’ve driven cross country 23 times, 16 of those times were alone. I always tell people, if you’re ever lost, confused, not sure what to do next in your life, get in the car and drive across country alone,” Farrelly said. (If you’re with someone, according to him, you “won’t get anything done.”) “It’s like you get into a state of transcendental meditation. You see the big picture. You get clarity.”
He said, much like his movies, he doesn’t go into his road trips with a plan. He has a notepad with him and he writes down everything that is cluttering his head (“Like, I haven’t talked to my sister in three weeks? Did I ever send a wedding gift?”) He knows that whenever he gets to wherever he’s headed, he’s going to get all of these things done. Once he gets it all out, too, he feels like he’s clear.
“It usually takes two to three days and then one day, everything is clear. I’m driving along and suddenly I can see exactly what I should do next, exactly what my issues are, and the thing that’s so stunning about it is it’s always the most simple, clear thing. You’re like, How could I have not seen it?” Farrelly said.
Sometimes he’ll scribble down ideas for future projects. One time he was nearly home in Santa Monica and he was really “on a roll.” Instead of going home, he started driving towards Malibu. He went up the PCH. He eventually made his way to San Francisco, feeling “it could take a year to get my brain open like that.” He hit San Francisco and started making his way back to Santa Monica, when the clarity shut down. “I limped back home at about 10 o’clock in the morning,” Farrelly said.
But did one of those trips inspire anything “Balls Up?”
“No,” Farrelly said. “This was just those guys, Warnick and Reese, being geniuses and sending me a script that was incredible and I had to do it,” Farrelly said.
He cast Wahlberg in “Balls Up” because he had been a fan of the actor since “Boogie Nights,” which he describes as “one of the most underrated performances in film history.” “I didn’t know him and I met him like, ‘Hi, how you doing?’ But I didn’t know what to expect of him. Turned out he’s just a prince of a guy,” Farrelly said. “I love working with him. He’s a pro. He shows up on time. He knows all his lines. He’s not pushy. He’s open to anything you suggest, and a dream guy to work with.”
Farrelly didn’t know Hauser either and “didn’t know how funny he was until he did this.”
The pair do have remarkable chemistry, particularly in a sequence where they’re both singing Gotye’s “Somebody That I Used to Know” (Hauser gets to do the Kimbra part). Farrelly said that he thinks it’s one of the best songs of the past 25 years. Other songs were considered, Farrelly said, but “Somebody That I Used to Know” was chosen, in part, because Farrelly could stage the karaoke version like the music video, with Hauser coming in and singing to Wahlberg. If, for some reason, the charms of “Balls Up” had eluded you up until this point, the karaoke scene should seal the deal.
That karaoke sequence takes place during a section of the movie set at a compound owned by Baron Cohen’s character, a drug kingpin who sees an opportunity to smuggle more dope in the giant-sized condom that the boys have devised. Farrelly said he had a lot of fun with Baron Cohen, despite his reputation as being somewhat prickly.
“I love him and I knew I wasn’t going to have any issues with him, because the only people that would have an issue with him or with Bill Murray or with Jim Carrey, and I’ve read about people that do are people who push themselves on these guys. These are geniuses. You don’t go into Einstein’s office and explain E = mc2 to him,” Farrelly said. “That’s what I do guys – I just let them be. Because everything he did in this movie, he made up on the spot. And you don’t ever want that. You don’t want an actor just making stuff up, unless it’s Sacha Baron Cohen, Bill Murray or Jim Carrey.”
Murray on “Kingpin” would look at the script, Farrelly said, and then he’d “make up all new stuff and it was always way better than written.”
Part of what makes “Balls Out” so refreshing is that it does feel like a true R-rated comedy, the kind that they don’t make much anymore. There are some pretty extreme gags in this movie, including a moment when a tiny fish swims into Wahlberg’s penis. (You can probably guess where it goes from there.)
But Farrelly has been here before. He said that when they made “There’s Something About Mary,” there hadn’t been an hard-R comedies “in years.” “We had to beg them to do it. They were like, ‘Oh, cut it down to PG 13.’ It’s like, ‘Damn it, let’s just take a notch up and really go for it.’ But after that came out and succeeded, there were tons of R-rated comedies and eventually it just gets old,” said Farrelly. “It doesn’t surprise you anymore. And then what happened now is there haven’t been any hard-R comedies for a while, so we’re back starting gate again.”
And while he would have loved for “Balls Up” to go to theaters, it was always meant as a streaming play for Prime Video. He has another movie he made for Amazon MGM Studios, “I Play Rocky,” which will be released theatrically later this year (more on that in a moment).
“There’s some good things about about streaming, to me, sitting in your living room with a lot of friends, like college kids, watching this thing, this would be a ball,” Farrelly said. “You can’t smoke a joint in a movie theater. This is that kind of movie. It’s just a fun movie.”
When we asked about “I Play Rocky,” which sees him return to the prestige, based-on-a-true-story world of “Green Book,” potentially with the same awards play. The movie tells the story of the making of “Rocky,” which would go on to become a blockbuster and awards powerhouse. Anthony Ippolito plays Sylvester Stallone, Stephan James is Carl Weathers and Matt Dillon is his father, Frank Stallone Sr.
“It’s an amazing story. Stallone’s story is crazy. A lot of people don’t realize that he wrote ‘Rocky’ when he was homeless, he was living in Penn Station for a while with his dog, and he was also doing soft core porn. That’s how he was making a living,” Farrelly said. “He wrote the script and the studio, said, ‘Great, we’ll love it. Here’s 20 grand. Go away.’ And he goes, ‘No, no, no, no, no, I play Rocky.’ And they’re like, ‘What does that mean?’ He goes, ‘I play Rocky. I’m in the movie. I’m the guy.’ It’s that whole story and amazing. It’s a great, great story.”
Farrelly said he is perhaps proudest of Ippolito. “He’s so good. He’s not the meathead that we found that looks like Stallone. He doesn’t look like him. But he transformed. It’s like a ‘Raging Bull’ job he did here. He gained 40 pounds, all muscle. He worked out for a year, got chiseled and learned how to box, the whole thing. It was just a genius performance,” Farrelly said. “You’re going be hearing about him for a long time.”
“Balls Up” is on Prime Video now.
