Interview: Will Ferrell
Let’s do the Time Warp Again
Will Ferrell travels through time and space to bring TV’s campy cult classic Land of the Lost to the big screen
By Prairie Miller
Will Ferrell is stuck in the past. At least, he is in his new movie, the campy sci-fi time-warp adventure comedy Land of the Lost.
A time-warp project in more ways than one, the 1970s Saturday morning kids show turned family flick has been on the back burner for more than a decade, with Ferrell attached since 2005.
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It’s actually the second Land of the Lost homage from Ferrell, who’s been a fan of the show since childhood. In 2001’s Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back
the actor played Federal Wildlife Marshal Willenholly; the name being a
collage of the main characters from the old Sid and Marty
Krofft-produced TV show: park ranger Rick Marshall, and his kids, Will
and Holly.
Now Ferrell has the lead role in director Brad Silberling’s
big-screen update, in which accidental tourist Rick Marshall gets a
major makeover, morphing from a park ranger into a paleontologist who’s
been scorned by the scientific community for his unorthodox theories.
And his kids have been replaced with two new sidekicks, macho
survivalist Will (Danny McBride) and Holly, a brainy research assistant
played by Pushing Daisies’ Anna Friel. But there won’t be any
high-tech tampering with those devilish Sleestaks — they remain all
natural and undigitalized, wearing kooky rubber lizard pyjamas similar
to those from the TV show.
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When asked for a little insight into other changes, Ferrell complicates rather than clarifies matters. “It is very serious, it’s kind of on the tone of The English Patient. But with dinosaurs, horribly, frighteningly realistic dinosaurs,” he teases, pokerfaced, during a recent New York interview. “In fact we only survive for 12 minutes in the movie. The rest is mostly just action shots of dinosaurs communicating through the Sleestaks.”
Not exactly a travel junkie in real life — trips down memory lane and time warps aside — Ferrell says he considers a journey to “the scenic part of Flint” to be an ideal getaway. Though, last year, he did travel to Ireland with his brother and his dad Lee, the latter of whom once played keyboard and saxophone for The Righteous Brothers. The Ferrell boys wanted to get in touch with their Irishness, and during a stopover in Dublin Will was presented with the James Joyce Award, named after Ireland’s famed author. The comedian says the whole thing “just kinda happened.”
“They were thrilled when I said, ‘Yeah sure,’ regardless of the fact that there’s no reason why I should receive that award,” says Ferrell.
At least he had heard of Joyce, or so he says. “I had! I’ve always been a fan of...his films! I loved what he did with Titanic. And The Terminator. All that stuff. They’re always too long, though!”
Big screen travels, on the other hand, are a different matter, at least when it comes to the otherworldly trip he takes in Land of the Lost. “This is going to be more like a nature documentary. It’s going to be kind of hopefully like Jurassic Park,” Ferrell says. “But it is not a spoof in terms of the look. It’s as real as possible, and hopefully funny.”
After being ostracized for his claims about space-time vortexes (including an uncomfortable appearance on The Today Show with Matt Lauer), Marshall is exiled to a day job at the La Brea Tar Pits where he tries to enlighten kids (who couldn’t care less) about the wonders of science. That is, until he and his two friends are sucked through a space-time vortex into a parallel, primitive universe.
And though it may not be so easy to think of Ferrell as an adventure hero, the little bit he does know about facing down baddies can also be traced back to his childhood, albeit learned from a different retro TV show.
“I used to have a Star Trek tracer gun that shot actual tracers,” boasts Ferrell. “And my mom let me have a little dart gun and said, ‘You can have it, but don’t ever shoot anyone close to the face.’ But one kid was really giving it to me, and I was like, I can’t hold back.
“So I shot him in the head with the dart gun. Or maybe it whizzed by his head. And my mom either saw it or heard about it, and took it away,” Ferrell gripes. “But I remember thinking, that was well worth it. He won’t be bothering me again!”
Time travel wasn’t the only challenge for the man voted one of the 50 Smartest People in Hollywood by Entertainment Weekly not so long ago. Just getting his head reoriented for an effects-driven family flick after a string of sophomoric comedies (Step Brothers, Semi-Pro, Blades of Glory) was no small feat. “It was a whole lot of new stuff for me,” says Ferrell. “But like anything else, you just learn to adapt. Luckily, we built these amazing, beautiful sets. We did claymation. A lot of tin foil. And we didn’t have to imagine everything [like] in a movie that’s just [computer generated]. So we had these amazing sets that we got to play around in.”
A sense of “play” is certainly a huge part of what has made Ferrell so successful for so long. “One of the things about being an actor is that we don’t have to fully grow up, in a way. Or at least I don’t! I think it’s the secret to success in life, to not grow up.”
Prairie Miller is a freelance writer based in New York City where she covers film for WBAI Radio.
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Prehistoric Poster Boy
They used to say sex sells, now it’s dinosaurs. Marketing minds
seem to agree, if you have one of these Mesozoic bad boys in your
movie, you’d better get him on your poster — mouth agape, pointy teeth,
ready to chomp. And from the looks of it, there’s a certain
Tyrannosaurus rex whose been getting a lot of call-backs.
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