[Film] I Love You Phillip Morris

“We have no distributor as of yet,” Glenn Ficarra and John Requa said on stage after the world premiere of I Love You Phillip Morris at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival. “Who’s buying?” So far, no one. Months after the festival came to a close, its most star-studded selection remains distributor-free.

The film found a uniquely divisive response among critics and the public alike at Sundance. While many critics championed its originality, others found it uneven. Some screenings were reported as “crowd-pleasing,” others “quiet.” People aren’t quite sure what to make of Phillip Morris, the directorial debut of Glenn and John (who had previously worked as screenwriters on films like Bad Santa).

Perhaps that’s because there’s never really been a film like it. A darkly (and occasionally wildly) comic, totally true gay love story set mostly in a prison, directed by a straight male filmmaking team and starring Jim Carrey and Ewan McGregor, two of the biggest stars out there, Morris is in a league of its own.

The film follows Steve Russell (Carrey), a Virginia Beach police officer who, after nearly dying in a car accident, decides to come out, leave his wife (Leslie Mann), and move to Miami in search of beaches and boys. Finding his new lifestyle “really expensive,” Russell resorts to credit card fraud to keep up with the gay Joneses. This winds him up in prison, where he meets the love of his life, Phillip Morris (McGregor).

After nesting up in a jail cell for a few months (Russell uses his con man skills to manipulate the prison social system and give him and Morris a lovely little existence), the two are separated when Morris gets released. This begins Russell’s lifelong mission (so far, at least… the real Russell continues to serve a 144 year sentence in a Texas prison today) to ensure they remain together. He escapes from prison multiple times (and always on Friday the 13th) by impersonating a doctor, a lawyer, and most astonishingly, a dying AIDS patient.

Think Catch Me If You Can meets Brokeback Mountain meets, well, something that’s never been made before.
ION Magazine got a chance to sit down with Glenn and John after one of the film’s screenings at Sundance, and learned a bit about how this distinctive project came together.

So how did you guys meet? And did you careers evolve together the way they did?
Glenn: John and I met in film school, at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. We became friends, and we quickly started working together, graduated together, moved out to LA together, made short films together… And eventually, we got professional work together. We’d worked on a short film, and we met some actor who was a writer on an animated show. He got us a job, and that was our first paying gig. Meanwhile, we continued to make shorts and then pitched out first feature, Cats and Dogs, which we sold to Warner Brothers in like 1999.
John: 1998, 1999… A long time ago… We’ve been paid screenwriters for like 10 years.

What were the challenges of transitioning to this, you’re first gig as feature directors?
Glenn: It was an interesting evolution… We’d written several features. And the idea was, when you write your first [script] you’re like directing it on the page and doing all these things. But then when you become a professional writer, you’re giving it up to a director and letting them do what they want to it. And you learn a tremendous amount. You learn that less is more. And that, no matter what, you can bring stuff to the table. So by the time we got around to this, we had already absorbed the process from so many people.

But in this case you weren’t handing over anything. You got to keep the control.
John: It’s extremely rare. We were given unprecedented control for first-time directors. We were given unprecedented control for fifth-time directors. We were really left alone… [The film’s executive producer] Luc Besson came in after the film was already put together. And obviously getting notes from Luc Besson is a pleasure. Having a great filmmaker like him help you make your movie better is a very good thing.
Glenn: Yeah, it’s a big difference… getting notes from a filmmaker instead of a studio.

So how did the project come to you?
Glenn: Producer Andrew Lazar got a book proposal based on a series of articles about this guy and he sent it to us. The proposal was called I Love You Phillip Morris. We took a look at it and just immediately it was like, these are kind of characters we do.
John: A lot of writers—screenwriters—are offered, you know, “Write this cheap and you’ll get to direct it.” And we never taken it too seriously. But once we had finally written it, we said, you know, we really want to direct this.
This film really blends a lot of tones. From darkly comic to more conventionally dramatic tones…

I’d imagine this was quite challenging. Could you speak to what you wanted to achieve, and how you approached this?
Glenn: The tone was a big challenge. It was always a concern from the moment we started writing.
John: But we were attracted to the material because it was full of challenges. It just pushed all our buttons. It contained so many things we had never done before. I mean, we were adapting a book. We’d never done that before. We were doing a love story. We’d never done that before… We took it on as a challenge. And we never really even thought it would get made. We said… “We need to grow as writers.” We were kind of getting pigeonholed into certain kinds of movies. And we needed to get a new skill set. So we took it as an exercise to write the script. To really take on a number of tasks we hadn’t before. It was a test. What we found—and it took us a year to write it, for free, so we almost went completely bankrupt, much to the chagrin of our representation—was that the test became a passion. So, in a way, I’m not gonna wax poetic or anything but it really is a true passion project.

How long was this process?
Glenn: Maybe four years? John: I think it took us about five years. Glenn: It took us a long time to get started. It took a long time to secure the rights. We were also coming up with a lot of projects. It took us about a year to write it. But once we got there, the production came together pretty quickly.

With regard to the gay themes… Did either of you ever feel like you were limited in what you could bring to the project because of your heterosexuality?
John: You know, I guess there was some apprehension. But we never treated it that way, that was the thing. The whole thing going in was that we were just telling a love story.
Glenn: It wanted to transcend that issue. We didn’t want it to be an issue movie.

And it’s not an issue movie.
John: And we really set out to do that. We had a lot of response from our crew members who agreed to do the movie thinking we were two gay guys. Because it was written so nonchalantly.
Glenn: Well, I mean, you could say only Nixon could go to China.
John: [Laughs] Well, you know, from the time we started writing together in college. I mean, our mentor was gay and we dedicated the film to him. Part of why we took this on is that we wanted to show… You know, [we were in college] in the late Eighties in New York and it was really in the wake of the AIDS crisis. And he lost almost all of his friends. He was suffered more than anybody I’d ever known. And it struck me as like… I’ve known a lot of gay people in my life. They’re survivors. And they rise above, you know. We wanted to write a character who was a survivor.
Glenn: And also if it was an issue movie, I’d feel kind of like a fraud because I have no experience with that. What I have experience with is love. And that’s how we wrote it.

I definitely found that this film wasn’t about victimization at all. Which is really rare in mainstream films about gay issues.
Glenn: Well, yeah, I mean you had Brokeback Mountain, which I think is an excellent movie. But it was still like things hadn’t moved. It’s like, being gay is a disease that we have to suffer and tragically die. Well, aren’t we beyond that? John: We wanted to use that perception of gay cinema to turn the audience on their head. And we won’t say more than that… We wanted to move on. The way we think about it, we wanted the world to think about it.

Words: Peter Knegt
Illustration: Jesse Williams

Update! I Love You Phillip Morris now has a distributor.