No, I Love You Phillip Morris is not an aggressively pro-nicotine sequel to Thank You for Smoking. It is important to point out right off that the cigarette brand uses the single-L spelling. The double-L variety is the effete, fair-haired object of obsessive affection for one Steven Russell, a real-life cop turned con artist turned con.

What he did for love is a far-out, fantastical journey, reported first in a nonfiction book by Houston Chronicle investigative scribe Steven McVicker and now in a major motion picture adapted by first-time directors John Requa and Glenn Ficarra.

“It’s our first love story,” Requa simpers with a tart tinge of mock sentimentality. Their previous stabs in that direction have fallen decidedly short of the mark, somewhere between scrappy (Cats & Dogs) and cranky (Bad Santa, Bad News Bears).

Irreverence, as you can gather, is their watchword—or, as Requa states as blandly as Bonnie and Clyde said “We rob banks”: “We push buttons. It’s a weakness of ours.”

But it is a weakness that has yielded them plenty of fun and funds. One can readily understand why the two of them, as professional miscreants and mischief-makers, were drawn to this true but bizarre crime spree that kept Russell zigzagging in and out of prison, where he will now zag for the next 144 years on 23-hour lockdown.

They didn’t even wait for the galley proofs. Andrew Lazar, whose producing “rap sheet” includes Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, merely waved at them a 20-page book proposal McVicker had prepared for a potential publisher. That was enough.

“Glenn started reading it,” Requa remembers, “and five pages in, he called me and said, ‘You gotta read this thing.’ So I read it, and we agreed to do it right away.”

“Doing it” took time. To get the proper perspective for the film, Ficarra and Requa interviewed the real Steven Russell in prison. “The movie is told totally through his eyes,” says Requa. “This is his version of the events. His real story is just a little darker. He had trouble dealing with the fact he was adopted and grew up in several homes. There was dark stuff there we didn’t have time to address.”

The Russell they introduce in the film is steeped in sunny, four-square suburbia—a Georgia policeman, married with children, who plays the church organ on Sunday. Fate, in the form of a horrific car crash, eradicates all that, and he emerges from the wreckage a screaming gay—literally!—ready to live the life rather than the lie.

Dumping wife Debbie and the kids, Steven makes an unfettered beeline for the gay shores of Miami, where he buzzes around a high-maintenance boyfriend and scams about to keep his head financially above water. Eventually and inevitably, this lands him in the hoosegow where—eureka!—he finds a soul-mate in his cellmate, the aforementioned and titular Phillip Morris. Strange, indeed, are the ways of love.

“Love, ultimately, was the selling point,” admits Requa. “It was cool that it was a guy who broke out of prison a bunch of times, but it was more cool that it was a guy who broke out of prison a bunch of times to get back together with his lover whom he’d met in prison. It was just too delectable an idea. Because he was always assuming that persona, he has this kind of Don Quixote feel—and it all just kind of felt right.

“We knew the trajectory of their relationship, but we didn’t know the actual incidents or dialogue. We always like to say it’s 85% true. The stuff that we had to make up, ironically, is the boring stuff. The most outlandish and unbelievable stuff is actually true. The workaday dialogue of their relationship we had to come up with.”

The results, on paper, must have read like a madcap Jim Carrey romp with dramatic pay-the-piper underpinnings in the third act, because that was the first name that popped into producer Lazar’s head. “We thought he was crazy,” Requa confesses sheepishly. “We were, like, ‘Okay. Sure. Do whatever you want. Knock yourself out.’”

Ficarra, Requa’s mostly silent writing partner, suddenly surfaces to amplify and clarify that: “We thought Jim was perfect for the role, being able to do the drama and the comedy—there’s not that many guys who can do that—but we figured that there was no way he would take it and there was no way that we could afford him.”

Way, as it turned out. Jenny McCarthy, Carrey’s actress girlfriend, read the script first, according to Requa, and simply announced “Jim, you’re doing this.” Carrey gave it a read and concurred. “He was on board very early and very easily,” says Requa, who notes the sway the actor brought to the project. “We got our first choices for the other roles after that. Once Jim said, ‘I like the project,’ people wanted to join in.”



Ewan McGregor entered the picture quickly as Carrey’s vis-à-vis, Phillip. “We basically sat down with Jim and said, ‘What do you think?’ We talked about a few people, but essentially Ewan was at the top of everybody’s list for that part.”

The Scottish actor mastered the Southern-fried dialect so well Requa considers it his “best accent work to date.” Of course, he did have the added advantage of hanging out with his real-life counterpart. Phillip Morris is now a free man, living in Arkansas, and he made a point of visiting the set during the filming. Ficarra says he even contributed a cameo to the film: “He doesn’t have a line, but he’s there. He’s Jim’s lawyer at the end of the movie, and the author of the book, Steve, is the judge.”

Russell, alas, was not allowed a pass out of prison to pal around with Carrey—nor was the actor permitted in to visit the man he was portraying. “We couldn’t get Jim into prison because he was too high-profile,” says Requa. “He listened to some recordings. The author of the book still had a good relationship with Steven, so he went in and had this long talk with Steven and then sent the tape off to Jim.

“But we went and met Steven. There’s no question that he could walk out of prison three or four times. He’s the most unassuming guy you’ve ever met in your life, but underneath that is a really smart guy. He, of course, is thrilled about the movie. He has even seen some of it in prison. He’s amazing. Somehow, he knows everything that’s going on. He did an interview recently, and he made it sound to all the world like he had read the script. We never sent him one, but he knows it intimately. He knows everything about the filming, and he’s promoting it from his little cell.”

Although most of the film takes place in Texas, not one of the 42 days of shooting was done there. “We were shooting in Miami, New Orleans and Shreveport—but mostly New Orleans,” recalls Ficarra. The reason? “We had to go to all the states that had tax rebates. Our budget wouldn’t have covered Jim’s salary, ordinarily.”

Requa and Ficarra owe their directorial debuts to an improbable executive producer: French filmmaker Luc Besson. “Originally,” says Requa, “we had Gus Van Sant as the director, but he went off to make Milk and left our project, so Jim, who had become friends with us by that point, said, ‘Well, why don’t you guys direct it?’ We’d always wanted to, so we were thrilled. Then our financier said, ‘Screw you!’ so we rather quickly had to find some more money, and Luc came into the fold. He and Jim met when they were shooting Ace Ventura, and they have been friends forever.

“He was really great to work with, too. Very hands-off. He’s famous for being hands-off. He looks at the dailies, and he makes sure everything is on track, but we didn’t hear from him at all. We had people there who were making sure we stayed on budget and on schedule, but there were no—literally—no artistic notes given.”

Requa is proudest of the scene where the comedy takes a sharp, unannounced turn into drama when the cellmates are separated and Phillip chases after the van taking Steven to another prison. “It’s almost exactly the way we wanted it. I happen to think it’s really emotional and old-fashioned. You shoot a scene like that, and you just hope it works. It comes on the heels of all this comedy, and, when we cut it and dropped it in the movie, it was really clear where we are. There was very little work to get it to function the way it’s supposed to work. I’m really proud of that scene.”

If one asks them whether, overall, they made a comedy or a drama, they both will answer in unison, “Yes.” Likewise, there’s no question which one is a piece of cake.

“The drama elements are easy,” contends Requa. “You show up at the editing room and look at the drama scenes that have been assembled, and they’re okay. Then, you spend the rest of the day slaving over one laugh, which you end up cutting out because it goes against the scene. Comedy is a laborious task. When you’re shooting drama, you say, ‘Oh, God, there it is’—and you get in the editing room and there it is. With comedy, everybody could be dying on the set—Jim could be in hysterics, and I could be on the verge of throwing up I’m laughing so hard—then you get in the editing room, and it’s crap. That happens time and time again, and then the funniest moments are things that you originally didn’t think were amusing at all.”

“Or you find ways to make them funny in the editing room,” adds Ficarra.

The secret, Requa says, is planning your laughs before you shoot. “We spend a lot of time as we’re shooting talking with Jim and the D.P. and even our editor about how to do a scene that gives us the most opportunity in the editing room. We’re always saying, ‘What if this joke doesn’t work? How can we continue on with the scene?’ We’re always thinking up escape hatches—different ways to reinvent the scene in case it doesn’t work. You’re always leaving yourself the options in the editing room so you can find the comedy and just play with it.”

Getting a chance to direct the stuff they write has given the duo a comforting control over their comedy. “Hyphenate is the only way to go,” Requa now feels. “I can’t imagine directing without writing. Before, we were just sawed-off filmmakers trying to get our point across through the script, so directing came easily for us. We have worked with a lot of great people, and they like working with us. They always said, ‘You have a unique point of view, and you’ve left a lot of stuff to work with.’”

Their next outing as directors is an untitled Warner Bros. comedy written by Dan Fogelman (Bolt), with Steve Carell starring as a man caught in a marital crisis. Then they’ll take a writing assignment—director(s) to be determined—for Carell’s company.

“It’s actually Steve’s idea,” Requa confides. “It’s about four buddies who go on a trip—the trip to Europe they never went on when they were in college, so they do it in mid-life—a middle-aged Hangover with emotional components, but basically a big, fun road comedy. We don’t have a title yet—it’s Steve’s Idea for a Movie—but we will probably push some buttons and get ourselves in trouble, as we usually do.”