Jim Carrey: Smart & Smarter

Does he still hold up Hanks's career as a model of what his could be? "We're in different places." he observes. "Tom Hanks is the royalty of the business right now and it's well deserved. I love his work and he seems like a great guy. I'm kind of a different generation. He's a little older than I am, so we're not necessarily up for the same things. I'm getting a lot of projects now, sifting through a lot of material. I don't want to lose touch with the funny, but I also want to tell stories. I really want to expand. Or maybe 'contract' is a better word for it."

We kick around the subject of the vagaries of fame, talking about people who were as big as Hanks or Carrey but who then took precipitous falls from bad choices, personality problems and combinations thereof. "I could screw up, say the wrong thing and my career would be over like that," Carrey says. "It's possible it could be over tomorrow. Every time you do one of those live interviews at a premiere or something, you risk saying something embarrassing and becoming uncool overnight. I just go into it head-long and hope for the best."

Although Carrey's future dance card includes such crowd-pleasers as another Mask movie, he is very businesslike in his intention to expand his audience and widen his range. When it comes to choosing projects, he says, "Very rarely do I jump up and say on my own. 'I must do this!' I have a lot of people who look at material and give me their opinions. It's like the President--he doesn't make a move without his aides, which is a smart way to be if you trust the Opinions of the people on your team."

Carrey may actually be courting an Oscar statuette of his own by hitching up with Peter Weir, who, in Witness and Dead Poets Society, guided Harrison Ford and Robin Williams to performances that took their careers in new directions. "He's awesome," Carrey declares of the director who will be his copilot through The Truman Show, a story about a guy who realizes he doesn't have a real life, he's just part of a TV show. "The first meeting we had he was over to my house playing me Pink Floyd cuts. He was explaining the character in a scene, and he suddenly got up, leaving me at the dining room table, to curl up in the corner for a long time. I loved that, because that's the way I am, too-- as soon as I have an idea, it goes right to my core, and I have to stand up and do something, I've got a feeling that, like me, he's a spewer, too. We just throw ideas against a wall--blam, blam, blam!--keep creating until the last second. He's not dogmatic, either. Whenever we talk, he'll throw something at me, then go, 'Please tell me if I say something stupid.'"

Carrey may soon be working with Ron Howard, as well. Pretty heady stuff seems to loom dead-ahead for a guy who once fell into a funk when he lost the comic lead in Sixteen Candles to Anthony Michael Hall. But he makes it clear that no matter how tony his future projects get, he'll have a taste for anarchy. Laughing delightedly, he says, "Sometimes, I'll be sitting with a really serious director talking about a project and I'll go, 'I think what this piece really needs is a little bit more mugging. And possibly, I'll just spaz out every once in awhile.' And I watch their faces drain of blood. I love to mug, though. Richard Belzer once said that someone should just attach a handle to the side of my head."

What about that remake of the Elia Kazan film A Face in the Crowd, in which Andy Griffith gave a blistering performance as a guy turned sour by fame? No mugging allowed there. "I love melodrama and I'm drawn to the tragic feeling of that great stuff with Elia Kazan--James Dean in East of Eden, On the Waterfront. To remake one of Kazan's classics is a pretty scary prospect, but there's a whole generation of kids who don't even know who the Beatles were who should see this story. They wouldn't go rent the Kazan version, although they should. So, you're not necessarily trying to make it better, just trying to make it your own and do it in a new form. When I rent movies, it's never comedies. I try to get the heaviest drama available, like Sean Penn and Christopher Walken in At Close Range--dad and son with guns in each other's faces. That's what I loved about Leaving Las Vegas. They found the light in such horribly sad subject matter. Nic Cage has got elephant balls. I've seen him make choices in films where everybody wants him fired. He's the Picasso of what we're trying to do. He's like, 'Why can't both eyes be on the left side of the face? Why does it have to be literal?' The guy has elephant balls."

As Carrey and I bid goodbye until next time, I ask about his immediate plans after The Cable Guy. "I'm going to get my bunion fixed." He isn't kidding. "I have this horrible bunion from brutalizing myself while I'm working. I'll have to lie in bed for awhile, so I'll get a lot of reading done, and I hope they give me a lot of pain medication. I'll just be Vicodin Boy. After that, I just want to go all over the place in movies and throw the hounds off the trail every now and again,"

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Stephen Rebello interviewed Jamie Lee Curtis for the April '96 Movieline.

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