Imagine That Director Karey Kirkpatrick: 'You Don't Think of Eddie Murphy as Shy, But He Is'
You have a resume that's almost completely made up of family films, but you've got an upcoming project, The Best a Man Can Get, that's very different.
It's based on a great, great novel by John O'Farrell, who's a guy I met when I was writing Chicken Run. He and Mark Burton were this writing team that wrote for some great British shows like Spitting Image and Have I Got News for You, and they had been brought in by Aardman to just come in and do a pass to make sure all my British dialogue being written by an American sounded British. So I met these guys and really hit it off, and we talked about doing some stuff together and John said, "Well, I'm going off to write a novel." "OK, good for you," and then a year later he gave me that novel and it was The Best a Man Can Get.
It's about a guy who has young kids, a nine-month-old and a two-and-a-half-year-old, and how his life's been turned upside down. His marriage has been affected by this, he doesn't really know his place in the world anymore, and he's living a double life. He still has another foot back in his bachelor life and hasn't quite fully committed to fatherhood yet. And this book so spoke to exactly where I was at, since I had a two-year-old and a six-month-old, and I call that time in my life "The Valley of Despair." You just have all these sleepless nights, and there's a bond with their mother that the kids don't quite have with you, and it was hard for me. It's like what we were talking about earlier: There are things you can no longer do because you have other responsibilities. I think it's a lot harder for guys to accept that. This book explores that in a really honest and humorous way.
You know, I've spent the last thirty-two years (with the exception of Hitchhiker's and some specs I've written that nobody's seen) crafting a career of fantasy and putting words into furry creatures' mouths. It's great for me to explore the other things that I feel like I have something to say about.
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'You Don't Think of Eddie Murphy as Talented, But He Isn't'
Eddie Murphy continues to walk the same road of career suicide that fellow SNL vets Chevy Chase and Steve Martin have been down.
seriously, how many people would pay up to see a raunchy romantic comedy where eddie has a meet-cute affair with a transsexual? don't run from scandal...lean into it.