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DAVID ZUCKER:
“We were waiting for a big scary movie to spoof – the original plan was to go with Ring 2, but it was rejected by the audience for whatever reason. It may have to do with Scary Movie 3. So we waited for War of the Worlds, because that was going to be a big alien-based movie. We had The Grudge already as our Supernatural Horror movie. So when War of the Worlds opened and did huge business, we knew we had our two main movies, and we proceeded to write a story where the Grudge house is next door to Tom Cruise’s house.”
ANNA FARIS (Cindy Campbell):
“Doing silly little movies like Brokeback Mountain enables me to do movies like Scary Movie 4. [she laughs] I really do have a great time making these movies and if there is a blockbuster horror movie I tend to think, ‘Oh that might be in my future.’ But even if I did call anybody up and say, ‘I just saw this movie that was ridiculous and we should spoof it,’ I don’t think they would care – they don’t ask for my opinion about much!”
CRAIG BIERKO (Tom Ryan):
“I was the new guy in this. Basically Zucker said, ‘Just stay out of the way of the jokes. All you have to do is say everything as though that’s what you’re thinking.’ The one thing that’s tricky is, you’re in a normal world, something completely insane happens, you notice it, and then you go back to this conversation that you’re having as though that didn’t matter.”
ZUCKER:
“Leslie Nielsen has such a bearing and authority that make him such a good actor, and he’s good at letting the lines do the work. He’s not putting a comic spin on them. We don’t need the actors to be Jim Carrey or Robin Williams, and I think the most comforting thing that I can say to actors is, ‘Don’t try to be funny.’”
FARIS:
“There’s a scene in the movie where I get hit by an airplane cart and you can’t even tell that it’s me which annoys me a little as I did get a little hurt. When it hit me it broke across my nose, and it stunned me so much I didn’t fall backwards, and David was like, ‘You were supposed to fall.’ I was like, ‘Don’t even talk to me right now, I’m in so much pain.’ The second time we did it I actually had to have someone pull me back – what we do for our craft!”
BIERKO on spoofing Tom Cruise’s appearance on the Oprah Winfrey Show in the movie:
“I knew that that was okay because Tom Cruise had beat us to it. He parodied it before we did on Jay Leno. So I knew that unless he was mad at himself he probably wouldn’t get litigious, because to sue himself would be ridiculous.”
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THE CONCEPT:
