Two somewhat unrelated questions. Obviously this film is being marketed to religious people and groups and there’s a lot in it for them. It also has a strong environmental message. Sometimes those two groups are somewhat opposed to each other because they support two different ideas. Are you concerned at all about how right wing Christians might view the environmental message and can you talk a little bit about the environmental message of this film?

Well, first of all I don’t think… I would like to bridge those two groups, if you will. I can talk a long time about this so please cut me off. First of all, when I think of the environment, I don’t think just of a tree or the stream or the air. I think of… You’re in my environment. What was your name again?

Bob.

Bob, you’re in my environment. I’m in your environment. We’re creating an environment right here – a respectful one hopefully. So it’s not just how you treat the air and the plants and the trees and the animals, it’s how we treat each other, hence the theme of kindness in the movie – to be kind. Now I think again we look for common threads in religions and Christ is in all. Okay, that would be the Christian side of things if this is Christian media. I think it is. If not, we can go Judaic. We can go other faiths. Christ is in all meaning that the divine spark is in all things. There was a line originally in the movie that got me to do the movie which was about God saying ‘You know I’m in all things – the plants, rivers, trees, oceans, wind, animals. Well you’re killing me here, kid. You’re killing me here.’ Not too far, too preachy, not going to be in the movie, but that’s the idea behind it. This is all a gift, you know, and the way we treat not only each other but this environment that we are leaving our children is important, and it’s a reflection I think of our faith and our relationship with the divine that gave us this life. Alright that’s enough. Amen. Can I get an amen?

[everyone] Amen.

Alright.

Over here.

Oh hello, hello. What’s your name?

Daniella.

Hi Daniella. If we could kill that light, it might be perfect. I think everybody could see me. [An assistant kills the light and everything goes dark] No, not good? [Laughter] Okay, better not. Alright Daniella, go ahead.

Well first of all congratulations on actually being able to put together a great spiritual message and comedy. It’s not easy.

Thank you.

You did it in a great way. I admire that. I just want to ask you, what is your spiritual orientation or religion?

Let me say first of all that there is no more Jesus freak in this room than me because when I was as young as I can remember, having cognition and thought, I was looking at that Jesus guy going, ‘Whoever this is, this is somebody that’s blowing my mind.’ At the same time, I’m also a subscriber of a poem that said ‘Truth is revealed so much to me that I can no longer call myself’ and then it would name various faiths. This is all I think about pretty much. This is the drive of my life – this relationship with this divine in me and you and in all things. So I don’t give it a definition although it defines me. [whispers] That was pretty good. [Laughter] Thank you for that question, Daniella.

Assuming this movie is a success, with there be a Packard Bell Almighty?

[Laughs] Someone was saying that they noticed – that would be appropriate when you hear what this person said. Someone said that they noticed that God only comes to reporters from Buffalo to save the world. So she would be a Buffalo reporter and she is quite almighty. She is a great lady. We have an idea for the next one but I’ll keep that under wraps.

When will be the next one?

Well who knows? I mean I can’t even think about it. I have to survive the premiere. I’ve seen this movie a million times. I’m ready to do something else. We’ll see. We’ll see.

Can you talk a little about casting Steve Carell? Was he in the movie always before there was even a script? And also his injury when you had to stop production for 6 weeks, what did that do to the movie?

We didn’t have to stop for 6 weeks. We actually stopped for maybe 6 hours. He sprained his ankle when he was jumping out of the car, you know, getting away from the animals that were on him – the spiders and the snakes. So very little. He did have to go to the hospital because he turned his ankle pretty bad. He wanted to keep shooting but we said ‘Get out of here.’ But we started shooting pretty soon thereafter. He couldn’t run for awhile so maybe we had to put some running scenes later – some more physical stuff. And the first question was?

Casting. When did he come into the casting process?

You know we originally thought about this with Jim (Carrey). You know, “Bruce 2: The Ark” was going to be the name of that. We even wrote a draft. Oedekerk with myself involved, we wrote a draft for Jim but Jim couldn’t decide either way. But I think ultimately he felt that his character had kind of arced out. There it is again. He’d kind of arked out. So he felt his character was kind of done. He had learned his lesson and we as filmmakers felt and as a studio felt there’s more stories to be told than just Bruce – you know in the bible how many stories where God visits someone and has a story to tell. So we think now there’s more potential down the road. Whether we tap that potential, we’ll see.

So when did Steve come into it?

Steve came into it right after Jim said, ‘Mmmm, can’t decide.’ And we thought about Steve. My agent, Dan Maloney, had brought him up as a possible choice if Jim didn’t want to do the movie 6 months before we chose him. And I thought okay that’s interesting. He was brilliant in ‘Bruce.’ He stole the movie. He stole the scenes he was in, certainly not the movie. That’s Jim’s movie, but he stole scenes and then I said, ‘Well what was his Virgin movie like? I heard he was good.’ And so I got an early screening of ‘The 40-Year-Old Virgin’ and thought this guy can carry a movie. I had a conversation with him about it and I don’t think I’ve ever had this happen before. I pitched him the idea and told him the story and he said, ‘I’m in.’ I said, ‘Well you know your people are going to want to get involved and you may want to have script approval.’ And he said, ‘No, I’m in. I’m in. I want to do the movie.’ I’ve never had that happen before meaning he said, ‘I trust you. I trust you, I trust Steve Oedekerk, I trust your creative team, I’ve worked with you, I want to do the movie.’

Setting aside the ark aspect, how conscious were you of parallels to “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington”?

Good question, very perceptive. I’m a Capra freak. I love Frank Capra. He believed in the goodness of people and one man’s ability to fight and often triumph. I did watch ‘Mr. Smith Goes to Washington’ although I’d seen it. I like being mentioned in the same sentence so feel free. [Laughter] It’s a very different movie but I do think that there are some core similarities.

Can I just ask about the dancing at the end? Was it in the middle of the movie that you decided to do that or when did you decide that would happen?

Steve improvised.

Really?

Very early on. He improvised a joyful moment. You know he was very high in the beginning of the movie. He’s got a big house, he’s got his new gig, he’s a Congressman, he’s full of power. He took a moment and did the new house dance and then I thought -- this is what I do -- see that’s really good, maybe that could be a runner in the movie. Let’s see if we can’t find places for that. And then we liked it so much that we thought with about two months left to go in shooting maybe we could do a sequence with this. If not just for the DVD, we’ll get the crew dancing and it became…

It kept people through the credits. Everyone wanted to see that.

Oh it’s really fun. It’s really fun and I think it’s very spiritual – you know, celebration, joy, dance. I think it’s a very spiritual theme, a good theme. If it was up to me, I’d make the 11th commandment ‘Do the Dance.’

Will there be a lot of extra things in the DVD?

Oh yes, lots of extra things. You’ll see how far we went in terms of some scenes that we decided were overstated or slowing things down or got too expensive. Didn’t want you guys asking about the money.

How much did you just let Wanda (Sykes) go? Were her lines scripted or did she ad lib most of that stuff?

Wanda is a genius. I mean I started calling her Rita Almighty. That woman rocked it so hard. Once I met with Wanda and my editor worked with her on another movie, I knew that it would be insane not to tap into her genius. So about 90 percent of what you see of Wanda is Wanda. Not necessarily the story lines that are driving things forward but if you’re laughing, I’ll bet that’s Wanda.

Thank you everybody.

That’s it?!

That’s it.

Oh where’s the controversy? [Laughs]