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JOEL SCHUMACHER:
“I loved [this] script immediately and thought it was totally original and very unique. I didn’t know anything about the 23 phenomenon at the time, so I Googled it and saw that there was endless insanity about the number 23. There’s even a website where people have been photographing 23’s where they see them all over the world. It’s a cult I didn’t know existed.”
JIM CARREY:
“A friend of mine in Canada was seeing the number 23 everywhere, he had a book full of 23 phenomenon. I said he was crazy; then I started seeing it everywhere. Then somebody handed me the 23rd Psalm, the valley of the shadow of death, living without fear, knowing that you’re taken care of, so I changed the name of my company from Pit Bull Productions to JC23, because I thought it was a great progression from grabbing hold of life and not letting it go, to not sweating it. Then a friend said, ‘I just read a script called The Number 23.’ I said, ‘I have to see this.’ And I read the script, I was compelled by it, and I was freaked out because the first page of the script was originally me trying to catch a pit bull, the Pit Bull Productions to JC23 was not lost there.”
VIRGINIA MADSEN:
“I think all this stuff is really fun, the shows on the Discovery Channel about ghosts and the yeti and UFOs, which I totally believe in, so I’d heard about the number 23, but I didn’t know how vast it was until really the first day of the production when Jim gave me this book with all the fun facts about the number 23.”
CARREY:
“And then her son started picking out things. He pointed out that Virginia’s name and my name together were 23 letters.”
MADSEN:
“And that it was Joel Schumacher’s 23rd film.”
SCHUMACHER:
“I think people have started to see Jim as the fine actor he is. Somehow in our culture, great brilliant comics are not revered in the same way as dramatic actors, which is crazy.”
CARREY:
“I’ve always thought of myself as somebody who lives in the middle of the wheel and is able to go to the extreme, to the outside of the wheel in any direction. The best-case scenario for me is to be able to be as zany and funny as I can, and then do something that is serious and has some depth to it. There are many different colors to paint with. I would hate to get trapped in one thing. I always feel like funny is an appendage, but it is not my whole body.”
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THE CONCEPT:
