By now most of you know have seen the commercials or at least know about the movie….but if you haven’t, here is the synopsis:

Steve Carell (The 40-Year-Old Virgin), reprising his role as the polished, preening newscaster Evan Baxter of Bruce Almighty, is the next one anointed by God to accomplish a holy mission in the hilarious new comedy Evan Almighty.  Blockbuster comedy director Tom Shadyac (The Nutty Professor, Liar Liar, Bruce Almighty) returns behind the camera for this next episode of divine intervention.  This time, however, his cast grows two-by-two. 

Newly elected to Congress, Evan leaves Buffalo behind and shepherds his family to suburban northern Virginia.  Once there, his life gets turned upside-down when God (Morgan Freeman) appears and mysteriously commands him to build an ark.  But his befuddled family just can't decide whether Evan is having an extraordinary mid-life crisis or is truly onto something of Biblical proportions...

To help promote the movie most of the cast and Tom Shadyac (the director) did some interviews on the Universal lot in Hollywood about a week or so ago. All the interviews were done via press conference – meaning about twenty something journalists each took turns asking questions. That’s why some of the questions are a little off topic as each journalist had an agenda and needed to ask certain things.

Anyway, the interview below is with Tom Shadyac, the director.

With rumours swirling that “Evan Almighty” is the most expensive comedy ever made it was no surprise that someone would ask about budget as the first question. And while I was curious how Tom would react, he was cool and collected and answered with ease.

The other thing to know before getting to the interview is the press conference had a lot of problems with the lighting set up. So when you’re reading the interview and you read people talking about light problems… you’ll understand why.

And before getting to the interview, if you’d like to see some clips from “Evan Almighty” click here.

"Evan Almighty" opens this Friday.

Tom Shadyac: This is surreal; we used to screen our effects shots in this room, checking to see if the water shots were real, or the animals shots were coming together… I have fallen asleep many times in this room.

Question: Hopefully that won’t be repeated today.

I hope not, I don’t think so, are you kidding me? I have to empty my pockets whenever I do work like this. I don’t like this one (he says about a tape-recorder on the table and moves it aside) Just kidding (he moves it back) – (squint’s his eyes) I can hardly see you. First question..

Not too much Tom, how are you doing?

Fantastic.

This movie has been widely reported as costing $200 million dollars.

Really? Wow. That’s kind of expensive.

How do you spend $200 million on Evan Almighty, and was the look that Steve Carell has in this movie influenced by your own look.

(laughs) Just the hairdressing alone was like $98 million. The budget thing kind of makes me smile because Spider-Man just cost around $300, we’re $170 plus I think is the official figure, although I don’t even know what it was – (shielding his eyes from the lights) those are going to be on I guess, I just am going to have to get used to it – we’re one of the cheaper summer movies, and yet we’re a comedy so it’s unique. But we’re much more than a comedy, as you know we’re a Biblical epic, we had an ark, we had thousands of animals, we had a flood, that helped. And if you look at the screen I could point you specifically to where the money goes, CG generation of water, composite shots that are 100 layers thick and deep, and the good news is, ticket prices aren’t going up because of this movie, people will get more for their money, and in this very competitive summer climate we’re glad that we can offer a lot for the dollar. And I’m also glad that a comedy is being given this kind of belief by a studio, that a comedy is being taken this seriously, and again we’re a Bible story too, we’re a Bible parable, we’re not just  ‘a comedy.’ It’s not two guys on a road trip behind the wheel of a Pinto, although I think I may do that movie, it sounds good. What was the other one? The look, you answered your own question, okay. Was I the look?

At which point during the various incarnations of this script did this turn into a Bible story and a Noah story?

I was involved in the original idea. Day one we started writing the script, we knew we were doing a contemporized Noah’s Ark story. It’s another chapter in the God series so we wanted to find a theme to hang it on, every parable has a theme, every parable is going somewhere, and you have to arc out your characters and they have to learn their lessons. Arc out, yes, yes, yes, didn’t want to be obvious. So, yeah, from day one.

Can you talk a little bit about the challenges of building such a large complicated set piece?

You mean an ark? Well imagine it, ‘Okay Shelia you have to build an ark, take care, bye bye then.’ You have to go do it. When we thought of this originally, back to your question, hey it would be cool to have a modern day ark, what if God came and told you to build an ark, oh man that would be cool, especially if you were working in a really serious job – and then you get there a couple of months before we start shooting and you go, ‘Oh, we have to do this, actually have to build an ark.’ And you realize that that idea now has to come to life. And the answer in one word is help, we needed lots of help. It’s the most extreme home makeover show ever done. We needed builders and engineers and structural engineers, because Noah didn’t have to worry about putting a film crew on his boat, we did. The equipment’s very heavy, how does that work, where are the weak points, the structural deficiencies, so we had a lot of help. We also had to figure out how Steve was going to participate in the building of this; he actually had to learn how to build a boat. We know about the keel now, the rib pieces, skinning the ark, how all that works. So I’m the guy to come teach that class in Sunday school, not that anybody wants to see it.

Were there any divine intervention moments, that means any kind of natural disasters that happened during the filming, like floods, lightning, thunder, and secondly I received an e mail from PETA a couple of weeks ago and they were a little bit upset by the use of exotic animals in the film.

Had they seen the film? Did they know what exotics they were upset about, because they could be CG exotics too, in which the CG PETA group would be very unhappy, but the actual PETA ground probably wouldn’t have a complaint.

I think they were concerned about the chimps.

The chimps, okay, okay, understand. Let me speak to the PETA first, I’ll do them out of order. They’re not wrong, there’s a certain amount of hypocrisy whenever you work with animals, even to show, which we hope we’re showing that respect of all of God’s creation, appreciation for the gift of the earth and the animals and the life here, and then to use animals for our end, for their own end, someone once said to me,  they looked at it as those animals are heroes for their species, so we did use a number of heroes, and I don’t discount people saying is that ultimately a good means to the end, the right means to the end, I don’t know. I don’t know. I respect their criticism, I don’t respect it on species we didn’t use, and also many of these animals were rescued. You know, Mark Forbes, our animal guy, is the most thoughtful person, he wouldn’t harm an animal, he’d sooner do himself in, and many of these animals have been rescued from other situations and can’t be returned to the wild, and this is the life that they’ve come to know or grow into, probably due to man’s hubris or whatever, our ruling of the world. That was a longwinded answer, but go PETA. The other question – we felt this movie wanted to be made, first of all when I sat down to write it, Steve Oedekerk is our writer, but I’m very involved in the writing, I’m at a hotel in Santa Monica and literally the day I sit down to write, it starts raining and it doesn’t stop raining for about a month.  And we’re thinking, ‘Okay, this is interesting.’ We go to Charlottesville and everybody is concerned about the weather, they say, ‘You should shoot in California, California we have the right weather,’ I said, ‘No, it’s got to be Virginia. He’s a Congressman, the esthetic doesn’t exist here.’ We go to Virginia, the weather is not only stunning in Virginia, like a drought like in the movie, but in California it starts raining cats and dogs. It starts raining for about a month and a half off and on, and it would have destroyed our production schedule. We then leave Charlottesville, after being blessed with incredible weather, and when we leave Charlottesville, the day we left, it rained and flooded in the very valley that we built the ark. So we’ll take this all as serendipitous good intentions from the great creative spirit, God, and we feel we were very blessed.

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