Attending CinemaCon to receive the Female Star of the Year award and to introduce her new film, “Bad Teacher,” Cameron Diaz also met the press. I asked her if, years after being surrounded by raunchy material in “There’s Something About Mary,” the fact that she’s now the one bringing the crassness as unprepared, unprofessional teacher Elizabeth Halsey was some odd sort of moment of progress. “I think for me, I’m not a feminist. Everything has evolved over a period of time,” she said. “I think this character is meant to represent the good and bad of what is possible in a human being, and I think that’s something that I appreciated — the fact that there’s certain things she doesn’t apologize for and there’s certain things she admits that she needs to do better on. She has a human level of incremental growth that we all have.”
Considering Diaz recently performed the heroics of “Knight and Day” before switching gears to the coarse comedy of “Bad Teacher,” I asked her, which is more exhausting: shooting the modern action film or shooting a comedy like “Bad Teacher,” where you spend the entire day representing the human id run rampant? “I’ll tell you what’s really exhausting: Shooting the action movie for six months and then going directly into shooting the human id running rampant. I (shot) six months of the action movie, had about four days off, and went straight into this movie. I was tired. I was like, ‘God, I should have taken a nap.’
Also representing comedy’s axis of evil? Jason Bateman, Charlie Day and Jason Sudeikis, who play three wage slaves out to eliminate — not fire, but kill — their wretched employers in “Horrible Bosses.” The three debuted the film’s teaser at CinemaCon. Did they feel any anxiety at the unveiling? Bateman brushed it off: “None. I don’t think any of us were investors in the film, so we don’t give a s—.” Sudeikis chimed in: “We don’t give a s—. I got paid.” More seriously, Bateman added: “We love this movie, and we hope that everybody loves it as much as we do. Yeah, the first time you send out those pictures of your baby, you think, ‘I hope people don’t call her ugly.’”
I asked if part of the film’s appeal was how it spoke to our current economic climate. Bateman, ice-cold, skewered my pretentions: “Way to tie it to the national zeitgeist. Well done.” Sudeikis stepped up: “‘Zeitgeist’ is in the zeitgeist now. I hear that word a lot. That’s addressed in the movie a little bit. We can’t hit people over the head with it, because it’s more of a good time than the Steven Soderbergh version of this film, but it’s definitely layered in there.”
“Horrible Bosses” also looks — with its inept murder plots — like a Hitchcock film with brain damage. (Sudeikis perked up: “Can we use that?”) Bateman explained: “We definitely had to incorporate an air of stupidity with these guys. You have to make these guys kind of dumb to make it plausible that they would entertain this notion, but you have to make them somewhat intelligent and feel somewhat real — they can’t be cartoon-y — so it’s relatable to the audience. The audience has to feel like us so the situation pops: ‘That’s me up there. I’d love to kill my boss. Let’s see, how would it work?’ Obviously it’s a comedy, so things can’t go right. It was this line — we try to make it sound like science, but we did dance this line a little bit between absurdity and reality from scene to scene. Nobody wants some super-highbrow comedy, because then three people see that. Nobody wants some stupid, booger-eating, lowbrow comedy …” Sudeikis laughed: “Because (then) 40 million people see it.”
–From my article at The Rundown
