- Why are you here? - 'Cause crushing the last
piece of hope in your eyes really gets me off.
- You wrote the role of Gary Zimmer
specifically with Steve Carell in mind.
Why was he your first choice?
- If you don't have a baseline of likability,
it's a tough road to spend an hour and a half with that cat.
So I think that he just has the perfect blend
of being able to bring in
the sharpness of the humor
with a little bit of edge, with some nice pathos.
He's able to paint with all those colors.
- Can I be completely honest with you, no bull?
- Be nice.
My daughter's here. (cow mooing)
- That was your daughter, with her arm up the cow?
- And so he was the first person
that I showed the script to.
He was the one that I wrote it for
and was lucky that he decided to do it.
- When it came to sparring with Steve Carell's Gary Zimmer,
was there room for improvisation,
or did you two stick to the script?
- We did improvise.
Steve did a lot.
I was pretty focused on trying to get
the political speak very correct
'cause they have a certain kind of drollness about them,
and they're totally just
rattling off facts and figures and political slang
and things that did not come naturally to me whatsoever,
so I was very much trying to just
keep my head above water with that.
The Democrat Party can't win, they're getting desperate,
they don't know us, they don't wanna know us,
and they look down on our values.
- No, no, that's we. You're D.C. elite.
- Oh, no, actually I'm from here.
- Wow, so this campaign has been
a bit of a homecoming. - It really is, Brooke.
Thank you. - No, no, no.
No, that's a lie.
- Okay, so, was it in the script for you to lick his face,
or was that something you guys came up with?
- That was in the script.
It's good to see you. - Yeah.
- You look fat.
I'd met Steve, like, half an hour earlier.
Like, "Hi."
- Why 'Irresistible'?
- I think the movie kind of functions
on two different wave lengths,
and I think I wanted people to feel very comfortable
thinking they were watching maybe a different movie
than the one they were actually watching.
And 'Irresistible' struck me as the type of title
that you might see in a rom-com, or some kind of,
so that when your expectations are set you could think,
"Oh, is this about a cynical political operative
that goes to a small town?
Is this kind of 'Doc Hollywood'?
Where are we going?"
And what it ultimately means is that,
- Now, in terms of the filming timelines,
it must've felt like a shock to the system
to go from Faith Brewster
to Gloria Steinem in 'Mrs. America.'
- It really was.
It was kind of a great companion piece, in a way.
'Mrs. America,' obviously, is a historical piece,
but it sort of reverse engineers why we're at
where we are today, which is where "Irresistible" is set.
And obviously playing women on very different
sides of the aisle and in very different sort of lights.
- You wanna get ahead
climbing on the shoulders of men, Phyllis?
Just know, they're looking right up your skirt.
- I would kind of describe Faith
as Elizabeth Banks' Jill Ruckelshaus but on steroids.
- Yeah, that's good.
- The small town election at the center of this film
really just highlights the corruptibility of money
in our current political system.
So, my question is, are we stuck?
Do you foresee any way for us to get out of this cycle?
- You know, it's political will.
and I think if we get to a certain point
where we decide, look, this-
The way that this system profits from itself
is destroying the rest of us,
and Citizens United's gonna make that a lot more difficult,
but I do believe it's worth revisiting.
I think revisiting the idea of the permanent campaign-
there's no other country in the world
that spends this much money for this long
and so entrenches those two parties.
So, I would love to see that revisited
in a really effective way,
but it's very hard to get powerful systems
to dismantle themselves.
That very rarely happens.
So, it has to be a kind of a cry of the people.
- 'Deerlaken: Always'
Nice.
I guess "Deerlaken Über Alles" was copyrighted?
- Well, we were actually gonna go with "I'm With Him,"
but then we remembered how f*cking stupid it sounded.
- No, no, no, I love it, I love it.
I love the whole town genealogy angle,
it's got a rich, bold, "You ain't from around here" flavor,
and what is that?
Subtle notes of xenophobia?