You mention ‘love’ and it’s true. You can tell that you guys love these two characters. I know that you got saddled with the term ‘gross-out humor’ but when I re-watched Dumb and Dumber yesterday it was striking how nice it was to the characters. Because modern gross-out humor is just an escalation of shit happening. But with Dumb and Dumber it mattered more that it was happening to them —
Bobby: Yeah, that label didn’t happen with us yet after Dumb and Dumber but after There’s Something About Mary it just stuck to us.
Peter: And it’s a really shitty term. It’s not true. It’s not funny because of grossness, it’s funny because of the situation. For instance, in There’s Something About Mary with the hair gel, if it’s just gross people would go “aaaaaaaaaaaghhhhhhhhhhhh!” but they don’t. They laugh because it’s the way a funny situation ends.
Bobby: If you go back and watch There’s Something About Mary you’ll see that it’s a very, very sweet love story. There’s much more to us than just trying to gross someone out. And that’s a huge laugh in the scene.
Peter: They call it “gross out” but people aren’t really grossed out by it.
We always do a Rhode Island premiere. We hope it will do well, but we really don’t know and after we premiered that one, this 82-year-old woman — who’s a friend of my mom’s — her name was Mimi, right?
Bobby: Mimi O’Dell, right.
Peter: She comes out, there’s like 100 people around, and she’s yelling across the street to my mom [doing a thick Boston accent], “Oh, that was so funny! You know what my favorite part was?” She’s from Boston. “My mom goes, ‘No, what?'” And Mimi screams [continues thick Boston accent], “When she gets cum in her ear!” And I’m looking at this 82-year-old woman smiling about a cum joke, and I’m rubbing my hands together, thinking we’ve got a hit on our hands.
Bobby: Yeah, we thought the Mimi’s of Rhode Island would’ve come out hiding their faces, mumbling, “oh my God, what were they thinking?”
[a junket attendant walks in to inform that we need to wrap up]
Peter: We pushed him into some small talk at the start, let’s give him two more minutes —
Bobby: Same thing I said on my honeymoon [laughs], “Hey hon, I’ll give ya two more minutes!”
On that note, I’m sure people are always coming up to you quoting lines from your movies, but outside of the infinitely quotable Dumb and Dumber, one that always sticks in my brain is an adaptation of your novel Outside Providence. Alec Baldwin as the father says, “Just remember: sex is like Chinese dinner. it’s not over until you both get your cookies.” [laughs] It’s greatly enriched my life.
Bobby: It’s some good fatherly advice. [laughs] I wish I got it.
Peter: That movie brought him back. Alec Baldwin couldn’t get arrested at that point. He couldn’t get on the studio lot. He got into a fist fight with —
Bobby: Anthony Hopkins.
Peter: Yeah, on that bear movie —
The Edge —
Peter: And he did Outside Providence for nothing. And we were blown away. And he started getting work again after that.
Bobby: Before that, even I had an image of him that was probably limited as an actor. But when we saw that —
Peter: You know what I remember about that movie? [pounds chest] The way he breathed. [Breathes in and out]. He made it look like every breath was a little difficult for him. And it made me care about him. It made him see so much older.
Bobby: It made you think he wasn’t going to be around forever. It was smart because as an actor you’re in demand when you’re dead.
At the end of Dumb and Dumber To — during the end credits — there’s a clip showing a parallel comparison between the sequel and the original. It’s pretty stark. Were you always wanting to have those easter eggs parallels throughout the film?
Peter: Not really. But when we were done we realized, wow, there’s a lot of parallels. So we started working on that closing credits sequence.
Bobby: We tried not to do it. It just kinda happened and sometimes when we were editing I started to get confused of which was in which.
Peter: You know what’s funny? We added that in during the test screening process. And once we did, the scores got higher, especially with women, because people just loved these characters. They grew up with them. And that reminder of them being stuck in boyhood forever just closed the chapter really well.
[SPOILER-ISH]
Peter: I was just thinking of it yesterday, but Harry gets shot in both films at the end.
Bobby: [laughs] You didn’t realize that?
Well, life is cyclical.
Bobby: “What if they shot you in the face?”
Peter: “That’s a risk we were willing to take.”
Brian Formo is a featured contributor on the CraveOnline Film Channel. You can follow him on Twitter at @BrianEmilFormo.
