im Carrey is best known for his outlandish portrayals of larger-than-life characters in such films as Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, The Mask, and How The Grinch Stole Christmas, but more recent performances, such as in this spring's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, suggest that the actor has emotional depths that have yet to be fully tapped. In his latest film, Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, Carrey combines those elements in one unforgettable character: Count Olaf, the hammy villain of Daniel Handler's best-selling series of children's novels.
Filmmaker Brad Silberling (Casper) directs Carrey and newcomer Emily Browning in this big-screen adaptation, set to open in theaters Dec. 17, 2005, and promises to give Harry Potter and the rest of the big screen's preteen protagonists a literal run for their money. Carrey, Silberling and Browning recently sat down with Science Fiction Weekly to discuss what inspired them to make this gothic children's masterpiece, and explain just how tough it was to find the right balance between adolescent-level thrills and adult scares.
Jim, what is the challenge of playing a bad actor like Count Olaf?
Carrey: I don't know why they called me. I'm insulted, actually. It's actually really fun, because when he makes choices, you don't have to do any research whatsoever. I'm an Irish pirate. OK, whatever. The thing is that he's always Olaf underneath it all, so I love the idea that he thinks the children are so stupid that they would never recognize him in a million years. That's the gist of this piece of material. It's that no one believes the kids, so Olaf is trying to work off that, but they immediately nail him every time out. I think that's a really cool thing for the books, that comes from the books, just that feeling that kids are on their own.
Is there anyone upon whom you based your physical or emotional characteristics for the role?
Carrey: Well, the weird thing is that Olaf turned out looking a lot like my dad, which is really frightening to me. I usually try to put a little bit of a dad-ism in my roles, so it's a kind of a wink to my family when they see my movies, but they saw the advanced pictures of this film and they went, "Dude, OK, now you're starting to scare us." 'Cause it really is like my dad. I thought of a slightly less human inspiration for this role, really. He was a kind of a smart bird ... the kind of bird that waits for you to leave the nest and then steals the eggs. And of course I have much experience with actors and acting classes and how that can turn into Jesus and the disciples in moments. How most—a lot of acting teachers kind of want that relationship, a type of guru thing. So, you know, Olaf is a bad leader. He's a bad leader, he's completely selfish, and if he's being nice to you it's because you have something he wants. He's just a fun character to play. Not to mention, it's the most dangerous kind of character to play, it's an actor losing his hair.
Do you enjoy transforming yourself completely, as you did for Lemony Snicket?
Carrey: I don't like it at all. I like the result. I have fantastic people working with me who are incredibly patient, like Billy Corso, and Anne Morgan, who does my hair, and they do brilliant work, and they put up with me when I lose my mind and have to run out of the trailer screaming. But I was pretty Zen on this one—after [playing] the Grinch, it's like CIA terrorist training or whatever. That one just brutalized me so badly that now it's like a cakewalk. You could hit me with a brick right now and I'd be like, "Hi."
Does playing a character which requires this degree of makeup enable you to really concentrate on character instead of just applying your own personality?
Carrey: To me, it's like a childlike fascination with, my gosh, how different could I look? What character is going to come out of this at the end of it all? 'Cause you really don't know. I mean, I'm shaving my head, I don't know if I have a dodecahedron under there, I have no idea what the shape of my skull is or whatever. You take a chance, you take a shot in doing it, and what I find is if you go full bore into it with faith, it always ends up surprising you, and you go, "Oh, wow." It's really a feeling of giving birth to something. You sit back and you look at this guy and you go, wow, that guy never existed at all, and now he's there in all his glory. It's great.
Do you consider this story to be in the tradition of Grimms' fairy tales?
Carrey: Exactly. Oliver Twist. Chitty Chitty Bang Bang with the child kidnapper character, that freaked me out when I was a kid. But I loved it. I loved creepy fun when I was a kid. It depends. I wouldn't bring your 4-year-old, maybe, but I think it is more than entertainment. It is entertaining, and it's funny, but at the same time, as the books did, I hope the movie does as well, it taps into something that's going on with young kids and teenagers, where even though we have two parents, sometimes, they're busy. And we all feel like we're on our own in the world. The kids do. And I lump myself in with them because I'm immature. But they all feel like they're up against kind of not being believed by anybody, and they have to prove what they say. You know, "It's a nuclear holocaust." "Are you sure? Are you on something?" And so they do feel on their own, taking care of themselves.
How did you cultivate a relationship with the children you play against?
Carrey: I just was constantly messing with them off-camera and stuff like that. I would even reach into the frame sometimes when Liam had his closeup and just manipulate his face. Because it was Olaf saying, "No, you're not expressive enough. It's all facial, you see." I had a lot of fun with them. They're a blast. The babies were crazy. They were tough. There were like 14 of them, I don't know. They were just actually breeding them in the back somewhere. Which I thought about when I was working with Emily and Liam. I mean, these kids, like, grew up on camera, it was bizarre. They started out these little kids, and then it was like, "Dig a trench, Liam's grown another foot."
Was there anything in particular you wanted to do to intensify the fear for the children in the film that you weren't allowed to attempt?
Carrey: You know, there was certain talk—there's a moment where Count Olaf slaps one of the kids, and there was a controversy over whether to have that in the movie or not. And I said, "You know what? Bambi dies, dudes. Bambi dies." In most really great movies that connect with people, there's some kind of tragedy involved, and some kind of pain involved, and there's a strange kind of balance that we're striking here. I'm not sure if it's been done this way before. Although I want to be entertaining, the bottom line is ... Olaf is not a nice person. I think he has to be that way. I said to them early on, I want him to laugh, but at the same time, the danger has to be real, or we have nothing. The movie is meaningless without real danger.
Brad, how difficult was it to couch the darker elements of the story for family audiences?
Silberling: What's kind of great is when you hear that, it just further validates Daniel's premise of the books, which is that no one listens to the kids. It's always the adults. And actually, as we would go through the process, and I would hear these potential fears, I would laugh and say, "Good—we're on the right track," because I did a thing knowing that these questions, of course, would come up. Forgetting the fact that you had like innumerable best-sellers parked on the best-seller list all from Lemony Snicket, it didn't matter. You still heard some of the anxieties at the studio, and it was funny.
I got a group of kids to come together for like a town hall meeting. They were mostly readers 10 to 13, 14, probably 15 of them on a Saturday. I brought them over to our art department and put them on tape. And I did it really as sort of a way to inoculate the movie, and I said, "OK, I'm about to start this film, and I'm going to tell you about some of the choices I'm making. You guys are hard-core readers, you'll tell me now. One thing I know you don't want to see is a baby hanging from a cage," and they would scream, "No! You have to!" I would go through all of the points that I knew would be the most hot-button issues, you know—Count Olaf is actually going to slap Klaus? You can't do that in the movie. "You have to!" So they were great—you had these kids talking about the danger of whitewashing the story.
Now, that said, it doesn't mean that financiers aren't going to still be nervous, but boy, it was the next best thing to sort of creating a shield. And that was true in the previewing process, too, was the kids would always give everybody courage, because once again the minute you started to second-guess them, even parents second-guessing the kids, I find that I have friends who are parents too, but they haven't read the books, or they haven't read them with their kids, on concept they're thinking, "Excuse me? They're going to go read what?" And it's when they actually get into the tone and they get into the sense that there is such an extremity to the story that the kids' resourcefulness is really what you're left with—you're left with the fact that you are empowering these kids.
Do you see this film as a synthesis of the effects-laden films and character studies you've done?
Silberling: To me it looked like an opportunity to do both. I mean, sometimes those don't generally meet on screen, and you do have those wonderful little Academy screeners of those beautiful little films that you didn't get to see in the theater, but they're really great, small character stories, or you have the juggernaut, studio tentpole movies that are all about effects, and in the end you just forget what you watched five minutes earlier. I just had this hope that you actually could do both, and in this case it meant for the story, filling in some of the gaps that I think you feel in the books, but you don't explicitly read, because they're not there. The characters are very dry in the books, you know, and there's a wonderful, subversive tone, but the fact that these kids just lost their parents and were just orphaned and have ended up with this horrible person, they don't tend, you don't have too many moments in the books where the characters just sort of land and have to acknowledge these moments together, and to me it seemed like if we were going to earn the right to have the rest of it, we had to have those moments, too.
How did Jim Carrey make this a unique movie? Without him, would it be markedly different?
Silberling: Yeah, because I got to work with a schizophrenic. I mean, in the best sense, where Jim is an unbelievable character actor, and I think if I had hired somebody else, I might have had a fantastic Count Olaf, but I wouldn't have had a Stefano or a Captain Sham. Jim is so inventive that what I got from him is, again, another person who's not quite mature, so he can think like a 14-year-old or a 13-year-old the way we all did when we were making the movie. But beyond that, we would find these characters together while we were making the movie. We would do, it was this weird process where we would do makeup and hair and wardrobe tests for each of the characters, because he and I would sit and try to put a look together, but we still wouldn't know a lot about the characters, and I would sit and interview him on camera—this is well before we started to shoot the movie—and from that would come these incredible improvs that were coming. ... I'd say, "Well, tell me about your idea for children's education," and you would get something fantastic that would come back, and it would be instinctive, and when it was done we took those improvisations and sat down with Jim and Bob Gordon, the writer, because there was beautiful work in there—it was very pure, it was character-based, because he was coming from responding to real—it was like an acting class exercise, and we, from that, effectively edited together, I think, 80 percent of the dialogue in the movie from his characters. Now, with somebody else I wouldn't have been able to do that with, but I got to harness this incredible improv mind, but do so in a way that then you could write with it, and I wouldn't have had that with somebody else.
Was there a lot of material juggled during the test screening and editing process?
Silberling: I think, literally, the only thing that, God, it's a matter usually of shots, because down to the wire I actually eliminated some material the day before I wrapped the movie. You know, you go back and forth, and usually it comes off of how you feel the audience is, if you've told the story in the first few minutes of the scene but the scene goes on for another two, and you know it and you go, "Ah." Captain Sham, for example, is a scene that probably there was easily another 90 seconds to that scene. Down to the end I was struggling because it was material I loved—you just love your babies, but you end up feeling like either the joke's been told or the story's been told. So I'm trying to think, because if anything I did more omission in the last stretch of making the movie. It's funny, we were talking about the slap—the most contentious moment in the movie, from everybody's standpoint, is whether or not Jim was actually going to slap, you know, a minor, and there was a moment when everyone was lobbying hard for it to go. But again, Jim was a great ally, as were, again, the readers. What we knew was that it's one of the most iconic moments in the book, and so everybody—Sherry Lansing and the people from Dreamworks, too—they got it, as much as they wanted to be scared and say, "It's going to be safer without it." At the very 11th hour, it was like, "It has to be there—it has to be." Boy, and the rest of it is small give-and-take. There was an on-camera escape of Olaf at the end of the movie that was something that was shot, and the only frustrating thing that I kept running into was that there was just confusion on everybody's behalf as to, temporally, where are we? Was this a fantasy, or was this actually happening? So that was something that I left behind, and visually it's one of my favorite things in the movie, but you have to go with the storytelling.
Emily, what was your perception and attitude toward the Lemony world before you got the role?
Browning: I had no idea—I love the book so much, and I had no idea how they were going to manage turning it into a movie. I mean, it was kind of great, because they don't describe the world they're in too much in the books, so I guess there was lot of—the set designers had a lot of creative freedom, and I think they did a fantastic job, because it looks really amazing, but I couldn't even imagine. But when I walked onto the sets, I was just blown away, and knew that any visions that I had had for the world, these were just 20 million times better.
How resourceful are you?
Browning: I'm not good with making things like Violet is. I'm not good at technology and that sort of thing. I'm probably more of a reader, like Klaus.
Why is Lemony Snicket so important to a certain generation?
Browning: Well, I think—I don't know about all kids, but I'm sure some kids, including me, are really getting sick of having kids' movies where the kids are so cheesy and really up and happy all the time. That's what's kind of cool about this film. It has the moral, I guess, of kids being able to stick together and overcome all this, but you know that more bad stuff is going to happen. But the thing is, you know that even though these kids are going to suffer pretty much their whole lives, they're going to be okay. You know that through all this terrible stuff happening, you know they're going to be okay, because they're really tough. But I think it's great, because it shows kids, and they have no adult allies. The adults are either horrible to them or they're just not listening to them. So these kids are completely alone, and I think it's good for kids to see other kids being able to deal with things by themselves.
How exciting was the prospect of working with Jim Carrey, and how was it to build a rapport with him, given that he's your nemesis?
Browning: Well, I was so excited when I found out that he was doing it. And at the same time, terrified, because it's Jim Carrey, and I was kind of a little nervous to meet him. But when it got to the day when I was about to meet him, I was like, "Yeah, I'm sure it will be fine." It was easy to talk to him in between takes and just chat, and he's a really cool, really, really nice guy, but then it was difficult not to laugh when we were in the middle of a scene, because he does heaps of improv, and you don't know what to expect. You don't know what's coming. So it was really difficult to keep a straight face, especially because he does a different thing in every take.
How many takes did the baby ruin?
Browning: It's probably even between her and Jim. It was more like when Jim was in a take, we would ruin it because we would just start cracking up the whole time. The baby, it was two babies, it was twins, Kara and Shelby. I mean, you can't expect 18-month-olds to be completely professional. It wouldn't be fair on them, and they'd have to be complete robots to just sit there the whole time. So they were kind of—you know, sometimes they wouldn't want to be there, and they'd just want their mom and they'd want to eat their Cheerios and be in their pajamas and whatever, and that was understandable. So they'd cry sometimes but sometimes they'd kind of go hyperactive and be pulling my hair and things like that, which is kind of difficult when you're meant to be there on a stage finding out your parents just died, and the baby's like spitting on you and doing all this stuff. But I also think if they did have babies that just sat there the whole time and did what they were told, it wouldn't have been as much of an interesting character, because Sunny has to have a bit of spark and has to kind of be a bit—I don't know, somehow the baby showed a sort of sarcasm that was really kind of cool, I thought.
How difficult was it to deal with the special effects?
Browning: It is, but there's not as much as people would think. It was really great, because when you got there, you didn't really need to imagine the world, because there were 360-degree sets, and it was all really there. So there weren't as much special effects as you think, so you sort of didn't really notice when there needed to be special effects, which I think was really good because it helped a lot with when you're acting to actually be in the world with the kids.
What was your relationship with Liam? Do you have a brother yourself?
Browning: I have two younger brothers, and yeah, we got along really well, and we sort of had a brother-sister thing going on while we—you know, silly little arguments, I'm right and you're wrong. We'd sort of do that every day. So yeah, I guess that was really good, because in the film, you sort of get the sense that these kids have never really been friends until their parents died. They've always just sort of been off on their own adventures and need to come together when their parents die, and they're kind of bickering all the time.
Are there limits to the action you could do?
Browning: Yeah, we did pretty much all the stunts. I mean, there wasn't anything too extreme. It was really not too much. We didn't actually jump from one half of the house to the other. We couldn't do that, but there was a lot of stuff where we're on the house with harnesses and it was on hydraulics and it was moving around. So yeah, most of the stuff was up. There were a couple things we didn't do.
What wouldn't they let you do besides the jump?
Browning: I think the jump was probably all that they wouldn't let us do. The only other time there were doubles was just like we were far away and you couldn't tell it was us. They would use just a photo double because we were working all the time. So I guess they'd use the photo doubles in wide shots so we could get some schoolwork in. But no, really we pretty much did everything.
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