ore than 10 years ago, Jim Carrey finally found a vehicle that combined his manic personality with the effects-laden adventures that dominated movie screens worldwide. That film was The Mask, and it went on to earn more than $300 million in box-office receipts. Naturally, the producers wanted to mount a sequel, but Carrey's expanding schedule (and his multimillion-dollar price tag) made an immediate return to the material an impossibility.
Jamie Kennedy, meanwhile, is a rising star in his own right: After launching a successful series, The Jamie Kennedy Experiment, in which he adopts prosthetic and makeup effects to pull pranks on an unsuspecting public, he went on to play numerous characters in both lead and supporting roles. His versatility made him perfect to follow in Carrey's footsteps, even if he wasn't literally returning to the original Mask character. Kennedy, along with his co-star Alan Cumming (X2) and director Lawrence Guterman (Cats & Dogs) recently sat down with Science Fiction Weekly to discuss the prospect of following up a historic film by one of the world's biggest movie stars.
Jamie Kennedy, did you enjoy wearing the mask?
Kennedy: It's cool, it was actually one of the best makeups I've ever had. It was really subtle to your face, and it really stuck, and you forget you're wearing it. But I wore it one time six days in a row, and by then your skin looks a little rough. The only thing is that I had ears in this one, and in the first one Jim didn't have ears. So the ears are glued to your ears, so your blood gets a little cut off, so you have itchy ears.
Was the process made easier because of the years wearing prosthetics on your show?
Kennedy: I really think that it's something that you have to love to do. I love becoming someone else, so putting on prosthetics is great, I love it. Sure, there's times where it's hard and you're going [groans], but I'm very comfortable in that. I enjoy doing it, I want to pull off the look, and it's not that big of a deal. I mean, I have really good makeup artists who apply—the material they use is a really light silicone, so it feels an amazing—it doesn't really hurt.
How much input did you have on the look of your character when you wore the Mask?
Kennedy: Me and Larry and the designers [worked together]. They designed it, and then we would [respond]. At one point my chin was really big, so it was really Jay Leno, but the hair, we had like five different hairs, but we thought that one would be the coolest, it kind of had a Bob's Big Boy feel. It was like Bob's Big Boy, and the Giant Green Giant's son.
Going into this, did you feel that you have to avoid doing anything like Jim did, or forget about it, "I'm just being me"? How did you approach it?
Kennedy: I feel that we had to avoid but yet pay homage, so it was a really hard line to cross. I'm not really in the mask that much, so I wasn't too worried, but those were my most nerve-wracking scenes, and I had done many voices, I've done many incarnations, like 10 different voices, and then we settled on the one we did, everyone decided. But it's kind of different than what he did. Mine was more of a Bob Eubanks kind of ultimate father, you know, like, "Hello, ladies," and Jim Carrey was more "Smokin'!" wild. There are certain things I can't not do, like the [popping] eyes. Stuff like that, that's just part of the thing that was The Mask, but the other things, I tried to make my own, but there's always going to be that comparison.
But if they had been contemplating a revival of the Jim Carrey character, would you have done it?
Kennedy: Never, never done that. How are you going to top that? I would never do that. That's why I wanted to do this, because this was different. This was a totally different thing, and it's a family movie, it's more about the baby and the dog, and then Alan, and then me in the middle like a straight man, I look at myself as more like the Ben Stiller character, things are happening to him.
How did you come up with the character of Tim? Is he based on anyone?
Kennedy: Tim is just me on a bad day. What I would do is I'd look in the script and I would say, "OK, there's like seven places where the baby does things that are peculiar," and I actually kind of did base it on—this is going to sound weird, but—The Shining, because Jack Nicholson in that movie has this slow progression of "What the hell is going on?" He just slowly gets more crazy, so I just watched this movie, and I thought that would be a good way of going insane. And he does it so brilliantly. So I would mark each scene with a mark, I'd go one through seven, which is a big one, which is a big one, which is a bigger one, and that would gauge my reactions so it was the same through the whole movie.
Were you able to improvise at all as the masked character, when the effects have to be so carefully planned?
Kennedy: I am not really able to with the effects, because you have to hit this huge mark, and a huge thing is going to happen, but I improvised more in the relationship scenes.
In many of the scenes you play straight man to a baby and a dog. Is that tough?
Kennedy: There's a documentary there. The behind-the-scenes with the dog is amazing, it's really well trained, but the dog trainer is behind the scenes, so as you're doing your stuff, he's like, "Come on Bear, hit that mark, eat that turkey, boy." "Dude, I'm doing a scene." So then he goes to do the scene again and he's like this [mouthing the words]. And then you're doing it with the baby, and then at 6 o'clock—the baby has to wrap every day at six no matter what. So the lady would come, the very first day I was doing it, and I'm doing a scene with the baby, and the lady came and she's like, and we shot in Australia, and she's like, "Baby's done, 6 o'clock, baby's done." I said, "What are you, a baby cop?" She said, "No, I'm a baby nurse, baby's done." And go, "Larry, what do you think?" "I know, dude, there's something about these rules and babies," so we had to go to the robot baby. So that was kind of challenging. Sometimes the baby would just cry in the middle of a [scene], he'd just break down, and I'm like, "What happened? I thought we were friends."
This must be the first movie you've had where there is so much CGI. Was that hard or easy for you?
Kennedy: I don't mind acting alone, I can do stuff, I can just pretend what it is, that's what we do, we play pretend. But it was hard in the sense that it's such a technical thing where you have to just get your ego and throw it out, because it's not about you, it's not about your performance, that's secondary, it's about the effect. So once I learned that, in the first two days, I was like, "OK," so I just gave over to it. And then it becomes really freeing, because it's not so scrutinizing a process, it's more about the effect, and you're like, "How am I doing?" "You were great." So I actually find it OK.
Alan Cumming, playing Loki must have been fun for you.
Cumming: I like when I get to do things where there are a lot of different disguises. I did this film first and then went to do Reefer Madness, and it's the same thing. I play one person within the film, but I change into all these other people. I really like that. It's great and it obviously, your ego is very flattered when a big film company thinks you can do all these different things, so it's nice. Also, I'm really intrigued by that whole Americana aspect of Looney Tunes cartoons. I really liked how much that played a part in the film. Then, when I went to see the director, all the storyboards were all around the building, and so that was really [interesting].
How much input were you allowed into the design of your costumes?
Cumming: With every film, really, you can have a say. I think it's contractual, with your makeup and costume. Obviously, the costume designer, she was brilliant, but you have an idea in your head about something, but she was great. I really liked the main costume, the leathery thing. I really liked that. I thought it was really clever and kind of weird, so, yeah, it's really important, especially for that part of the character. I got to wear that so much and feel comfortable in it. I thought it was a good way to go with the character, also the hair. It's so creative. I find it hilarious that it's a kids' movie and here I am shoving my crotch out in leather. It's very funny.
What was more difficult for you; the makeup for Nightcrawler or for this?
Cumming: Well, Nightcrawler was much worse, because with this, when I get angry and have that green thing, the big prosthetic green thing, which I hated, and I only had to do that maybe five or six days. So, with Nightcrawler, I did it about 40 times, and it was like four hours, and there weren't even any prosthetics on my face. It was just blue stuff and some tattoos. That was horrendous. Every moment of being on the set was like that. It was spraying stuff on your face. On this, when I had to be [Loki], they scheduled it so they could do something first in the day, so I wouldn't have to come. On Nightcrawler, I still have the call sheet. It said "Alan, pick-up 2:42 A.M." That was my earliest pick-up.
What does that green face feel like?
Cumming: It's absolutely horrible. The worst thing about it is that you're completely enclosed, and it's like you can't really do anything. It must be a bit what it's like to have Botox or something, because it goes right under your eyebrows and everything, and it's really hot, and I had these contact lenses, and you can't really see. You feel so kind of corseted and weird and, actually, I learned a very interesting thing. I felt really freakish, and the same thing with Nightcrawler, until people got used to me on the set. When new people would come on the set, it would be like [staring intently] "Hello," like that, and you just go "Eww, stop it. Don't look at me." With the green, angry Loki, I felt the same thing. Everyone wanted to look and stare at you, and I felt kind of like a circus thing. Obviously, I'm an actor and I'm used to having people look at me; otherwise I wouldn't do this job. But it doesn't feel like it's you. I actually feel like it could be anyone inside that thing. I think it was a little over-designed.
In the film you play a manic game of Twister with the baby. What did that scene require?
Cumming: It's all these stuntmen and body doubles. They're all dressed up as me, so the bit where it pans along is different [people]. It was kind of hot, because there were all these muscley Australians hanging onto my legs. My head's way down here and my arm is over there. It was great. That's how they did it. The baby was there one time. And another time, it's me in a funny blue thing with all the spots on [the motion capture suit]. Then there was another stuntman holding me down so I could sit up like that [suddenly]. It was kind of crazy because there were all these people dressed in blue or green holding parts of your body. It was quite strange. There are things you have to imagine, like the baby's ear is tickling you or something.
My favorite thing was when, on my birthday, I had to be lying in a dumpster. I had all this crazy burnt makeup and a smashed-up face and crazy clothes, and I had to lie in a dumpster for a closeup just landing there. I did it a few times and the first A.D. came and said, "Larry said, could you be more amusing?" I said, "Of course—it's my birthday, and I'm under a banana skin or a rotten tomato."
Lawrence Guterman, how long have you worked on this project with New Line?
Guterman: I was with it actually from August of 2002—almost two and a half years.
Had they already decided that Jim Carrey would not be returning?
Guterman: Yeah. I remember reading about that years and years and years ago, that Jim Carrey wasn't going to be in the sequel. And so I wasn't really a part of the process of developing it before then, so I don't know all of the incarnations of it. But when I came on, he wasn't going to be on.
It seems like Jamie Kennedy isn't quite the central figure that Jim Carrey was in the first film.
Guterman: Actually, that was the idea—not to do another movie where another guy gets the Mask, becomes empowered and feels confident and gets the girl—because that movie was done, and it was done with Jim Carrey, and nobody can ever do that movie better than Jim Carrey. That was much more of a sort of 14-year-old adolescent fantasy of winning the hot girl. This is much more of a guy who's growing up and learning to be a responsible adult and at the same time retaining his creativity—wondering if you can sometimes kind of have it both ways, if you let things come your way and don't always try to control everything.
What made Jamie Kennedy the right actor for the role?
Guterman: I saw one of his skits on The Jamie Kennedy Experiment where they were doing one of those candid-camera scenes with a woman with a date show, and he asked her out on a date, and there's this character who plays his older brother—who's very muscular—and the older brother starts hitting on the date and the idea is, is she going to go for the older brother or is she going to stick with Jamie? And Jamie comes out and he's very meek, and he's very sympathetic and very funny. He comes out and he goes, "What are you doing?", and there was a certain softness in him and a natural empathy you had for him, that I thought, "Even if he's this guy and he's not ready to have kids, and he has an occasional one-liner or wisecrack about it, you're still going to like him, and you're still going to go with him, and he's got kind of an Everyman quality." And one of the things I liked about what he did in the movie is his escalation of being driven insane by the baby, like all of those beats and sort of ordinary jokes suddenly having to deal with this overwhelming [situation] because he's coping with the trials of fatherhood to the nth degree.
Are you a giant fan of Looney Tunes cartoons?
Guterman: Yeah. That was in the script, and we expanded on it. Yeah, it's very sort of Chuck Jones-influenced. The first movie had a lot of influence from Tex Avery, which was more from the '30s and '40s, more of the hyperbolic, exaggerated animation, and then we took some of that and we springboarded to more of the Chuck Jones. Actually, there's a very funny story about Chuck Jones where he says if you watch the Coyote-Road Runner cartoons and the Coyote goes flying off of the edge of the cliff and he goes down to the canyon, there's a beat and then [smacks his hands] and a puff of smoke. He used to talk about how if it was an 18-frame delay, it was funny. If it was 17 frames, it wasn't funny. If it was 19, it wasn't funny. I don't know if that story's apocryphal, but that whole idea of the comic timing of the Chuck Jones movies of the '50s was a big inspiration in this movie.
How much consideration went into the distinction between comic, CGI violence and live action?
Guterman: Part of the idea was to design it in a kind of somewhat hyper-stylized fashion so that you were never really, it's not like you were watching, you know, The French Connection or anything [laughs]. You stylize it enough, and then you stylize the sound effects, and you stylize the design, so that you know that that dog, just like the Coyote and the Road Runner, you know—the anvil lands on his head and he's okay in the next scene. You know, you show that the dog gets blown up and charred, and then the next scene he's planning the demise of the baby.
Does this story come from any of the original comic books?
Guterman: My understanding is that there was a Mask Saturday-morning cartoon show in which a baby got the mask, but I never saw that [laughs]. Lance Khazei, the writer, came up with the idea, and I don't think he derived that from any of the comic books.
What changes did you make to the Mask from the previous film? It seems less flexible than before.
Guterman: Well, it may have been, or actually probably what it was was that it was more emphasized in that film, meaning you spent much more time with Jim Carrey with the green face on, reacting to what was going on around him—when his face turns into a wolf and all of that sort of thing, and when he sees Cameron Diaz and blows the whistle like the old Tex Avery cartoon—but since this is really just a question of the Mask as a device to get her pregnant to get the baby with the powers of the Mask. And then the baby's face turns into Woody Woodpecker and the baby's the one that sort of has all of those crazy powers and the dog when he puts it on. So that was the idea.
How do you make the CGI look so convincing in the transitions between animation and live action?
Guterman: Thanks for that compliment. Well, we just really, gosh, when we got ILM and [Phil] Tippett to start with to do the work. Phil Tippett does great work and so does ILM, and I worked with Tippett Studios on Cats & Dogs but also with the fellows with ILM when I was going to direct Curious George at Universal. That was in '99, and that didn't go through, but I had worked with those guys closely, so we had a shorthand already, and we worked for a year prepping all of the sequences, the set pieces that had animation in them, and we worked for probably eight months designing everything. I mean, there was a lot of preparatory work that was done so that, for example, the design of the house in the movie was what I would call kind of cartoon craftsman style, but the actual dimensions of the house were designed based on having already created that sequence where the dog gets yanked through the house, that sort of Rube Goldberg-esque sequence, and so that house was designed based on the dimensions we created for that sequence as opposed to vice versa, where you might design an aesthetically pleasing, an aesthetically appropriate house for this kind of movie, and then say, "Oh, maybe the dog will go through here and smash through this and end up on this fan and crash through this wall and so forth"—so when all of that stuff is designed in advance, you can often sort of perfect the look and feel of it. Also, Tippett did a great job with the dog, I think. The fur was amazing to me—light-years beyond what they had when I did Cats & Dogs with them. They really developed that out and then ILM did a really great job with the animation of the baby and making him feel like he really came to life when he said "mom" or "mother" or that kind of stuff.
How tough was it to direct the actors to respond and interact with the CGI characters?
Guterman: That was something new for Jamie. He was a great sport about it, but yeah—half the time he was carrying a stuffed baby if he has to run and stuff, or there's a moment where he hugs the baby and the baby crawls up in his lap, and that was a CGI baby that crawls up into his lap. "Just imagine it—no, no your hands are going through the baby right now; widen the arc of your hug." It's difficult because he's crying and trying to get into the scene and trying to emote.
How did your science background help you in the filmmaking industry?
Guterman: It definitely helped—I mean, in the big picture, it helped just because I can talk to the visual effects supervisor in his language and I can talk to the people in the computer animation houses in their language mostly, and I know enough about it that it's not that I know a little bit and I'm really dangerous. It's that I know just enough about it that I'm no longer dangerous and it can actually be done efficiently and be creatively supportive. I had a great time talking with those effects houses; they really bent over backwards.
Are you comfortable in the family movie genre, or do you want to branch out?
Guterman: There's all kinds of stuff I would love to do. I mean, I love the genre, but I also love, gosh, the first Terminator was like a favorite movie, and I love Dr. Strangelove, and I would love to make a movie that's sort of a political satire. I mean, there's a whole range of stuff that I would love to do. And you know, you try to infuse every movie with some of your sensibility as much as you can. I know in Cats & Dogs, The Terminator was an influence on the sequence with the Russian cat, but it was a kitten instead of a giant robot.
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