The Farrelly Brothers Discuss Casting 'The Three Stooges,' Career Advice for Jack Black and 'Hall Pass'

Two men, Owen Wilson and Saturday Night Live's Jason Sudeikis, have eyes bigger than their marital beds. Their wives—Christina Applegate and Jenna Fischer—do the unthinkable: they set them free to act on their fantasies. For one week, the dudes have a hall pass to hook up with other women. It's a premise edgy enough to get Bobby and Peter Farrelly back behind the camera after a four year hiatus following 2007's The Heartbreak Kid. Fifteen years ago, the aftershocks of the Farrelly's Dumb and Dumber and There's Something About Mary ushered in a new era of R-comedies. It's a shock to realize that the brothers are now the wise veterans of the comedy landscape, and in this candid interview, they talk about the moral changes they've seen, the couples' conversations they're about to start, the actors they've launched, and their dreams for the decade and a half-delayed The Three Stooges flick, today as close to creation as ever.

You're two happily married guys making a movie about cheating. What did you like about this script?

Bobby Farrelly: It was definitely a high concept idea, the kind you could explain to someone in a couple lines: two married guys get a week off marriage. You could see it in your head: things can happen in that situation. And it was such a dangerous idea. We like that kind of stuff. There were a lot of different ways to tell this story and it took us a lot of time to figure it out. You know, marriage is a sacred institution. It was tricky to do because it was such a bold concept. We wanted it to be funny, we wanted it to be done correctly, without being too dark.

Peter Farrelly: These guys are not cheaters; they're lookers. They constantly have systems for looking. If you're walking down the street with your wife and a woman's approaching, you don't wait for her to pass and then look back. You look back before she goes by you and she's walking into your line of vision—you were there first. The thing is: guys look. We're visually oriented. That's why Playboy sells and Playgirl doesn't. Guys like to look, even faithful guys do. And the wives get fed up with it, so they go to a psychologist who tells them that guys are under the impression that if not for their wives, they'd be getting all those women. Cut them free for a week, let them find out the truth. Of course, the first night the guys go straight to the bar at Applebee's. They have no clue; they don't know where to begin. And the wives, one of them grabs the other and says, "Excuse me! If our husbands aren't married, who are we married to?" It goes both ways. It's a guy concept, but the women are the big winners.

You're making fun of the male imagination as primed by beer commercials.

P: Exactly. And, you know, the older you get, the greater you were. You start thinking, "I remember I could do this, I could do that!" Well, why don't you go out and try to do it? They find out they have no rep, no appeal. Basically, they're invisible to the women who they would like to pursue.

Before you explored the humor in this situation, did you have to get your wives' blessings? Were you worried people would be elbowing you and saying, "Hey, what's going on in your house?"

P: I'll tell you the truth. Pete Jones wrote the first draft. Pete Jones is the guy who won Project Greenlight.

With Stolen Summer.

P: And it turns out the guy is a really good writer—50,000 people sent their screenplays in. He won. Turns out he's not as good of a director as he is a writer, but he never really intended to direct. He just won the contest, so they gave it to him. He sent us this script—we didn't know him—and we just flipped for it. It had a lot of laughs. We ended up rewriting it with Pete Jones, but after we did the first draft with Pete, I gave it to my wife like I always do and she fucking hated it. Hated it. At that point, the women didn't go off and have their own hall pass. They were sitting there that week biting their fingernails going, "I wonder what they're doing right now." The joke was nothing, but my wife was like, "Fuck that! If you get a hall pass, I get a hall pass—are you crazy?! I don't like those women, and I don't like those guys who would be married to those women." We woke up and realized the truth: women are going to hate this thing. If you give a guy a week off from marriage, then that makes you single, too. Once we realized that, it really became a much better movie.

B: Absolutely. We didn't just want to say it was a guy's take on this. We wanted it to be balanced because that's what marriage is: it's a two-way street. If we told it from a guy's perspective, it'd be wrong. The gals in our lives, our wives, had input. And I think we accomplished that with the script-whether you're male, female, older, younger, you can relate to the story.

These two couples have a lot of candor. Can you be too honest?

P: I'll be honest with you. Every girl that I see, I want to fuck. But I don't do it because I know it could jeopardize what I have. And that's the truth. I didn't get married until I turned 40, and before then, I botched many a relationship because I cheated. When I got married, I learned a lesson. I got hurt and I hurt other people. But that's not to say I don't have that pull. If God came to me and said, "Pete, I have the best woman on the planet for you," that doesn't mean I wouldn't like to be with the second best.

Commitment isn't putting on blinders. It's choosing not to act on what you see.

P: Yeah, and it's not easy. You get married and think looking is going to go away. It doesn't go away. You're still 16 and when you see a pretty girl, you go, "Ah! That would be nice!" But hopefully, you've reached a level of maturity where you don't act on those impulses because you have too much to lose. A lot of people, including myself, learn that with painful lessons.

Does the average male aspire to a Hugh Hefner lifestyle, or do even they roll their eyes?

P: I think it's funny. People just laugh at it. I don't think many guys would want to be Hugh Hefner's age and be with a 24-year-old woman. As you get older, you start falling apart. I'd be embarrassed to show my body to a 24-year-old right now. I would be humiliated to have to undress. I don't think many guys really want it, but I'm amused by him. God bless him.

You've cast these men against type: Owen Wilson is the tamed animal while SNL's Jason Sudeikis is the guy gone wild.

B: Jason's a break-out guy. He's going to make a lot of great movies real soon. He just delivers. It's exciting for us to be working with guys like him because he's not as well known as he's going to be. He's on the upswing.

He's got a great face for comedy. He can pass for a straight man, but he's odd enough to be memorable.

B: There's something about his look that's almost anachronistic. He's got that all-American look to him, but at the same time he's very subversive and almost gifted funny.

P: Jason Sudeikis is Jack Lemmon. He's got a Jack Lemmon feeling from top to bottom. He feels like he stepped out of the '60s—he's got that kind of vibe. And he's hysterical, he's the perfect second banana. He just kills me.

You have worked with a lot of characters on that upswing. What's it been like to watch them bloom?

B: I love it! I really do. That's a lot of fun. It's also a lot less—don't know if stressful is the word-but when you're working with a guy at the top of his career, it's always a big budget picture because the guy's getting paid a lot of money. When you're doing it with a guy who's on an upswing, you're doing it at a cheaper level because the guy's just happy to be getting work. It's fun because nobody wants it to work more than the up-and-coming guy. I love working with guys that you just believe in. People haven't seen them do a lot of different things yet, but you know they're very funny.

You get to show off what they can do without a hundred investors watching your back.

B: That's always in the back of our mind! We run a business and we want to deliver the goods. We want everyone to be happy, including the studio. You're always vaguely aware that you want all of the money put into a project to come back. When you're working on a lower budget, it's more of a challenge because you don't have a guy who's going to necessarily open a movie. But there's a lot of excitement involved.

If you could give Jack Black advice to get his career back on track, what would you say?

B: I love Jack and I think he's hysterical. He's got to be true to himself. He's got to go with what he really believes is funny. I'm not saying he hasn't done that, but I know he's a funny guy and he's extraordinarily creative. There's not a question in my mind that Jack Black is here for the long run and he's going to make a lot of great projects. If not the next project, then the one right after that. People like him. He'll be fine.

Back to Owen—

B: Owen, a lot of times, is portrayed as a guy who's really cool and has it all together. They spoof it in Zoolander where he's Hansel the male supermodel, an object of desire. In a way, he's like that in a lot of his roles. We definitely wanted to go against type because if he's too cool, then it's not fair that he gets a week off of marriage. We wanted a guy who was going to have to work for it a bit. So what we did with Owen is make him a suburban dad, more dorky than we've seen him before. He really did a good job with it. In this movie, he's doing stuff differently than he's ever done before—you're really going to like him. He put his ego aside and played himself in a different way.

And kids raise the stakes.

B: Owen and Christina have kids; Jason and Jenna don't. If we had two married couples, odds are one of them is going to have kids. We wanted to make it as realistic as possible, and believe it or not, marriage leads to kids. It does definitely raise the stakes.

P: When we pitched Hall Pass to Owen, he said, "I don't know? Are people going to buy me as this married guy?" I said, "Absolutely. Five minutes in, they're going to buy it. You're going to look different, sound different." And they do. By the end, it's a completely different Owen than the one you've met before. I've known Owen for many years now. When I first saw Owen in Bottle Rocket, it blew my mind and actually inspired me. When I saw Bottle Rocket, we were writing There's Something About Mary and we'd hit a wall. We were on page 50 and it was obvious what was going to happen. Mary was going to end up with Ted. It was disturbingly obvious. We couldn't write. For two weeks, we were just scratching our heads wondering how we were going to get out of this. And then I saw Bottle Rocket, which starts with a group of guys who have this five year planned robbery spree and you're all set up for this plan that they're about to do. They set off on their first night, they stop at a motel and one of the guys falls in love with the maid. And they don't go anywhere! But it's totally entertaining. I thought to myself, when those guys were writing their script, I guarantee their first thought wasn't, "Let's write a story about a guy who stops at a motel and falls in love with a maid." They were going to go on a five year robbery spree. But when they got to the maid and it got funny, they said, "Hey, what if this happens instead?" And it occurred to me that Mary doesn't have to end up with Ted. She could end up with anybody. I had Bobby watch Bottle Rocket and we talked about it, and from that point forward, we wrote the script being fair to all of the people in it, all of the guys. You didn't know who she'd end up with—we assumed she would not end up with Ted. But we were going to write it so that she could fall for any of these guys-we didn't know who she'd end up with. By the end of the movie when the audience thought she was with Brett Favre, we thought, "They really do think she's with Brett Favre." Then we decided to give her back to Ted. It was a real lesson in how to write, how to keep all options open.

Which is a writing manta you're now famous for: you start your screenplays without ever knowing the ending.

P: We always have the first act worked out beat-by-beat. We know what the problem is; we know our characters. And then we unleash it and let it go where it wants. We don't put up the index cards with A to B to C to D. If something good happens—you run into a maid at a motel—let her develop. That's our best stuff.

Do you think it takes two writers to bounce around ideas until they come up with something creative? Does being a team double your brainstorming power?

P: For us, yeah. We push each other. If one guy has an idea, the other guy can make that idea better. And then the first guy makes the second idea better. Not everyone needs to do it, that's for sure. Woody Allen, Neil Simon, they write alone. But I have a hard time—I don't think I'm as smart as those guys.

How does your process work?

P: We don't start early. We're not early birds. We usually get together around 11. The first thing we do is sit around and talk: world news, sports, rumors, old friends. Then somewhere around noon we eat. After eat, a cup of coffee, a glass of tea. Somebody will say, "C'mon, let's cut this bullshit—let's go." And then we grind it out for the next five, six hours. And that's a good day of writing. When you first start writing on a script, we could go days or even weeks doing nothing. It's hard to get that creative side of your brain open. It's very comfortable just to sit there and reminisce about bullshit. And finally after a week or ten days, one of us will say, "Hey, what the fuck!?" And then we work. We never walk in the door and sit down and go. We sit down and say, "Hey did you see that play in that game?' Our strength-well, our key, I don't know if I should call it a strength—is that we'll put in more time than other people. We will. Because we have kids, I'll go home for dinner, put the kids to bed, and then I'll come back. We'll work from 8:30 to midnight, one in the morning. You've just got to put in the time. I'll be lying in bed thinking about it, driving in the car thinking about it. We just think harder than other people. Good enough isn't good enough. You find something good and then you think hard about how to make it better.

Is there a tether of how far you can live away from each other?

P: Bobby lives in Massachusetts and I live in Ojai, California. It gets tricky. But in the summer, I go back east to Cape Cod. You really only write about four solid, hard two months every two years. And then other than that, you're casting, hopefully making a movie, editing, doing this or that. But during those four months, he'll come out here for a couple weeks, I'll go out there. Or we do it in the summer where we can get a couple months in a row.

And how do you work together on the set when you have to join forces to wrangle your crew?

B: Of all the things we do between writing, directing and editing—the three times you make a movie—the time on set is probably the easiest. We have the script the way we want it to be and it's a lot of fun. Writing the movie is the hardest work. Making the movie, we need to be a team so that we don't convey to the actors that we're in any way indecisive. Pete and I do sometimes see things differently. One of us will say, "Hey, what if he was less jokey in this scene and played it serious?" The beauty of making a movie is we can go over to him and say, "Hey, try it this way." We can get what we want. Later on, one of the ways will reveal itself to be the right way. But what we don't want to do is reveal to the actor that we don't know what we want because it can be confusing. In general, one or the other goes over and talks to the actor. Not both. We confer and then give them one set of directions.

When you do have disagreements, how do you settle it?

B: Where it becomes more problematic is when you're writing. If I'm thinking we should go down this road to the left and explore it and he thinks we should go in a different direction, it's hard to write both. In writing, you can't go down every avenue that comes up. At those points, we have to decide. If we have differing opinions, we have to talk it out. And if we do have differing opinions and we both feel strongly about it, it's usually because there's something wrong in that part of the story. So then we know that we really have to look at it and analyze it until the answer becomes apparent. But while you're filming, you can do a scene several different ways. It's fun to do it that way to have more choices in the editing room.

How do longterm collaborations avoid making too many compromises that average, not strengthen, their ambitions?

B: Luckily, Pete and I have the same sense of humor. We have the same goals. So 95 percent of the time one of us comes up with an idea, the other guy will say, "That's great!" Or you try to figure out a way to make it even better. Very, very rarely will we see things in a different way. And when we're diametrically opposed, there's something wrong with where we are in the story. It's a time when it will serve us well to shine a light on the problem and see how to fix it.

Talk to me about developing the characters that Jenna Fischer and Christina Applegate play.

B: First off, they're terrific. They made it easy for us because they just nailed these two parts. I'd work with either one of them again in a minute. In our story, the girls go away for a week and leave the guys at home saying, "You're not married this week. Go ahead and get it out of your system." In a number of the drafts we had, they were just gone. And eventually we thought, "You know, we're making a mistake not showing what they're doing." And since they also had the week off, the stakes became higher. It took us a while to get to that, but it felt better once we did.

Does it seem like it's easier for women to pick up men?

B: I'm no expert, but guys have to work for it. When they're out courting, there's a lot of work involved. Good-looking women like Christina and Jenna don't have to try as hard. It comes to them, if they're open to it. But a guy has to do a lot of legwork in order to woo a woman.

One thing you two do is create female characters who are as strong as the rest of the movie around them—many comedies don't let the women be funny.

P: That's a nice comment. We've worked with the best actresses in the world and no one notices that. When they think of our films, they think of Jack Black and Jim Carrey and Ben Stiller and Bill Murray. But we've worked with Gwyneth Paltrow, Cameron Diaz, Kate Winslet, Renée Zellweger, Meryl Streep, Cher, Christina Applegate, Drew Barrymore, Jenna Fischer. We get unbelievable perforamances from our women because we hire the best—and we're lucky to get that because you usually can't get those kinds of actresses in our kinds of movies.

Peter, you and Gwyneth both have daughters named Apple. How did that happen?

P: I will say this: my daughter was born first. Apple, my daughter, was a baby on Shallow Hal. But coincidentally, Gwyneth's manager had a daughter named Apple, as well. Where it came from, I don't know. But I love the name, so I'm glad she chose it.

Bobby, you once said that if you weren't make films, you'd be selling insurance. Is that really true?

B: I was selling insurance before I made films! But I wasn't very good at it. Which freed me up to try something new because I knew that I couldn't keep selling insurance. I didn't know what else to do. I studied geology in school. Neither Pete nor I had any film training at all. We love a good story, we love to tell stories, but we have no official training in the film business.

Still, you guys have been making comedies since 1994. What changes have you seen in what audiences—and studios-are looking for?

P: When we started making movies, we were coming off the '80s and people were a little shyer, more easily offended than today. It was a golden opportunity for us. We came along and there were the John Hughes movies—which were great movies, I love those movies—but they weren't pushing it. They weren't R, most of them were PG-13. Dumb and Dumber was a PG-13 movie. It took us five years to get that movie made because of the studio complaints: "You can't do that!" We couldn't do the Jeff Daniels bathroom scene, and we were like, "Why can't you?" It took us a long time to convince people that you could do that stuff. The same thing with Something About Mary. There hadn't been a really balls-to-the-wall comedy since Animal House. The studio was like, "You can't do the hair gel—it'll be NC-17!" No, no. no. If it's for titillation, it's NC-17. If it's for humor, it's R. It was a great opportunity because the audience wasn't expecting it-we had them right where we wanted them. We should shock and blow minds and freak people out. Now, it's harder and harder to do that. They expect you to push it. And sometimes when you push it, it doesn't even feel organic to what you're doing. It feels unnecessary. It's a lot harder to surprise people now than it was 16 years ago-much harder.

How would you describe today's audience appetite for comedy?

B: Comedy is very subjective. What makes one guy laugh doesn't necessarily make another guy laugh. When we made Dumb and Dumber, we were being true to ourselves. This is what we thought was funny, what our friends back in Maryland would laugh at. It wasn't necessarily what the studios and the creative execs were finding to be funny. But we figured we only got one shot to make our first movie, so we should be true to ourselves. Even as it was coming out, the studio didn't think as highly of it as we did. But I was very grateful that we had done it that way. It could have gotten watered down by a lot of people's opinions and been a lot more vanilla. We learned a big lesson from that. Over the years, what people laugh at is completely different. There's a lot of filmmakers now who have more cachet than we do. But we're still trying to be true to ourselves, to do what we think is funny.

P: I think today's comedies are way better than they were when we started. Judd Apatow's films I think are sensational. All of his movies are solid, very solid. Also the Will Farrell, Adam Sandler, they're getting better and better. If you look at Sandler's movies from 15 years ago, to me they're not as strong as they are now. I think comedy is in phenomenal shape. I used to go years without seeing a funny movie. Now I see five or six a year that crack me up.

And you guys have helped push it in a new direction?

P: I wouldn't look at it like that because comedy is cyclical. The movies in the '70s were exactly like what we're doing today. In fact, there's stuff in Animal House and Blazing Saddles that you can't do today. They were pushing in all sorts of ways that we can't, making fun of racism. Today, it'd be hard to do that. People would be appalled when really they were making statements about and against racism. We certainly didn't invent it. We were just the first guys back on this wave.

When did you know you wanted Hall Pass to be an R?

P: It's a hard R. I like the trailer that's out there because it gives nothing away. This movie goes in places that you wouldn't expect and comes back full circle. There's an old saying in the theater that if you bring a gun onstage, it must go off. When you have a concept where a couple guys get a week off from marriage, someone's got to get laid. You can't pull up short. Fifteen, 20 years ago, that's what they would do: they'd come up short and realize that what they left at home is better. They'd go home and that'd be the end of the movie—and everybody would have seen it coming from the beginning.

Today, audiences will hold that ending against you.

P: Yeah, we can't pull that punch. Then the question becomes who gets laid? How many get laid? And how the hell does it end up well? That was the really difficult part to do, but I was really happy the way that it worked out.

What would you like couples to be talking about after they've seen Hall Pass?

B: If we've done the movie right, we'll have couples talking. They'll be talking about the concept of, maybe not so much getting a week off, but what it is that makes their marriage work. Marriage is for a long time, if it's done right. Sometimes the passion ebbs and flows. I just think married people are going to be able to relate to the fact that there are ups and downs, but in the end, marriage is a good thing.

You resolved years ago that when you finally make The Three Stooges, it's going to be PG.

P: We always assumed it would be PG-13 just for the hitting. It's a lot of hitting. But we went to the MPAA in advance and showed them original Stooge clips and asked them, "What is this stuff?" They said it was just PG because they're cartoony hits nobody believes, and nobody gets hurt. When we realized it was PG, then we looked at the rest of our script. You know, there's no sex in the Stooges. You might have a woman come by with cleavage and the guys will go, "Nyung-ga-ga-ga!" But the last thing you want to think of is the Stooges as sexual beings. That would creep you out. So there's no sex and there's no language, so it's a natural PG. One of the great PG movies of all times is Napoleon Dynamite—it's not PG-13—and yet it's hysterically funny. They didn't have to do anything to make it PG. The way those people talk and live is PG. And that's who the Stooges are.

Was it also important to be able to introduce the Stooges to kids so that they can grow up with them the way you did?

P: Absolutely. We'll get made fun of for making the Stooges PG. And no matter what you do, there's going to be groups saying, "How dare you! They're icons!" But the Stooges were never given the A treatment. They were always considered B. They got B class treatment always. They never got the Laurel and Hardy, Marx Brothers treatment. They didn't even get movies-they made shorts. For my money, I always found the Stooges funnier than those people and it's sad that they never got the glory they deserved. They never made any money. They were lower middle class people and they died with no money in the bank. And yet, we love them and they're hugely influential to us. We want to give them the A treatment they deserve.

I have an uncle whose entire basement is dedicated to the Stooges.

P: Yeah? I have a couple friends who are just the same. They literally have been collecting Stooge memorabilia for 40, 50 years. Their whole basement is loaded with everything Stooge.

His wife, my aunt, collects nutcrackers. She's easily got 300 of them. And when he banned her from bringing any more into the house, she went to a craftsman and commissioned him to make Three Stooges nutcrackers. It worked, she broke his will.

P: That's funny! That's very funny!

You've had to answer questions about The Three Stooges for 15 years now.

P: I know-we finished the first draft 12 years ago!

How do you stay committed to a project for a decade and a half? What keeps you going?

B: Just the belief that the Three Stooges were remarkably funny guys. It's rare that I can watch comedies from the '30s, '40s, '50s and still be laughing at what they did. Because comedy changes. That slip-on-a-banana-peel humor is always funny, it's internationally funny. We think that those guys did it as well as anyone. We don't want people to think that we're trying to be better than the Stooges, but if we can recapture some of the comedy that they did and reintroduce them to a new generation of kids, it'd be a good thing. We know it's a risky project because these guys are legends of comedy, but we hope we can do them a service.

It's true, you have to balance two audiences: their audience and your audience.

B: If anything, we'll be more true to the original guys. We don't want to just reshoot their old gags—we have to come up with all new gags—but we have to be true to Moe, Larry and Curly. We're going to be as true to them as we can.

Any plans for Shemp?

B: Maybe if we're lucky enough that the franchise works, we could reintroduce Shemp down the road. I'm not sure. Shemp did come in later. No Shemp yet.

What's that like to work on a project under so much scrutiny?

B: We've had some great actors circling the project. That's exciting. Sean Penn—we haven't seen him do comedy in a long time. We like to open it up to anyone and anyone. We love good actors more than we love guys that you think of as comedians. When we cast Jeff Daniels in Dumb and Dumber, he wasn't the most obvious choice. But we thought that he was a brilliant actor, and if we'd written the script correctly, he'd be able to do that. We feel that way about all of our parts. But not everybody can nail those characters. You have to nail their look, and that's tricky.

There's been more ink dedicated to talking about it than Avatar. Just last month, there was a new rumor that Johnny Knoxville was in the cast, which you had to shut down. But the internet loved the idea of Knoxville—does that make you take a harder look at him?

P: We're definitely considering him, but the truth is we haven't chosen anybody. It could easily be Johnny Knoxville—it could easily be several guys—but we don't want to give the impression that we picked anyone. We haven't even met with Knoxville about it. But he is one of our all time favorite guys. We worked with him on The Ringer, which we produced, and he was fantastic to work with. I'd love to work with him again. To make this movie, you gotta have three really cool dudes doing it because they're going to be slapping the shit out of each other. I don't want somebody who's going to flip out.

Jim Carrey said he decided he was too old to gain weight to play Curly.

P: He started gaining weight about a year ago and he didn't feel very good. You could always put on a fat suit, but none of us wanted to do it that way, so he dropped out. We take a zen view of casting. If we had gotten who we wanted on Dumb and Dumber—I don't want to mention names but it would have been way worse than what we got. We were lucky that 150 people passed on Dumb and Dumber, which led us to Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels. Nobody could have beaten them. So that's how I feel about the Stooges. Yeah, it's disappointing when Jim Carrey, Sean Penn can't do it. But in the long run, I know we're going to get the best people. It's just the way it is. You can't control everything—and I try not to—because if you do, it's only going to be as good as you could make it. As opposed to opening up the universe and letting something better happen.

The Stooges are over 80 years old. How will their humor work today?

P: They're timeless. They'll work in any time because of their physical humor. If you look at physical humor, it travels well and it ages well. You know what doesn't age well? Verbal humor, repartee. It gets old because that changes. But hitting and slapstick and falling still work. Of all of our movies, I expect Dumb and Dumber will last the longest because of the physicality in it. And I think the Stooges are the same. I think we could have made this movie 50 years ago, 30 years ago, 10 years ago—we could make it 10 years from now—and it would still work. It's not reliant on a wave of humor.

Are you competitive with other brother acts? More than you'd be with a solo Judd Apatow?

P: I idolize the other brothers. We wouldn't be in the business without the Zucker Brothers. When we would watch them growing up, we were like, "Holy shit! They're hysterical!" And from what we could gather about them, they seemed like good guys having a good life. They inspired us to get into the business, without question. And then the Coen Brothers, who are just phenomenal. We love those guys. The Wachowskis, all the brother teams, we love them all. We're certainly not competitive with them. We're proud to be amongst them.

Where are the filmmaking sisters?

P: That's a good question?! I don't know what that's about. There are a lot of brother teams and no sister teams. Honestly, I have theories, but I don't know what they hell they mean. For instance, it seems like boys share bedrooms more than girls do. We had twin beds and a lot of our humor came from lying in them and laughing all night. Our parents would yell, "Be quiet! Go to bed!" You share a room with someone and you get to know them pretty tight. I don't hear of a lot of sisters growing up the same way. It seems like girls need their privacy. But I don't know? That's just my theory—I have no clue. Maybe sisters do share rooms as much as guys do? But they will come along. There will be a sister team and they'll be huge. Some sister team is going to come along and explode and more will follow.