| By Elliot V. Kotek John C. Reilly has taken part in more than forty films since his 1989 feature debut in Brian De Palma's Casualties of War, a film that marked the first of three cinematic collaborations with Sean Penn. Having since worked with directors Woody Allen, Danny DeVito, Terrence Malick, Walter Salles, Taylor Hackford, Curtis Hanson, Lasse Hallstrom, Wolfgang Petersen, Paul Thomas Anderson and Martin Scorsese, he topped off an impressive decade of dedicated work with an Academy Award nomination in 2002 for Chicago - a year in which Reilly co-starred in three of the five films nominated for Best Picture. This summer, Reilly has already made us chuckle as a singing cowboy in Robert Altman's star-powered A Prairie Home Companion, and he looks set to make our sides split again in August, when Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby tests the alphabet collection of cinema's hard-working marquee managers. Moving Pictures Magazine: Talladega is set in the world of NASCAR, and no NASCAR team is complete without nicknames for its drivers. How do you and your teammate refer to each other?
John C. Reilly: Shake and Bake. I am the "Shake" to Will Ferrell's "Bake." It's kind of like the one-two punch that Will and I have. I've known Will for years now, and we'd been looking to do something together. We were already friends, and he and [Will Ferrell's co-writer and Talladega director] Adam McKay are old friends, so they have a strong working relationship already. It was a blast. It was fun to go to work everyday to laugh. I think that, despite the fact that it's this big broad commercial comedy, it's a pretty subversive movie. Adam McKay and Will both have a real subversive streak, so there are odd things in there that wouldn't be in your run-of-the-mill homogeneous popcorn movie. MPM: Like British actor Sacha Baron Cohen (Ali G, Borat) who stars as a homosexual, French NASCAR driver?
John C. Reilly: It was funny. In a way it was like Sacha's first movie, even though he's been in movies before. I think it was the first time he's played a character that wasn't totally written by him. It was interesting watching him work in someone else's world. We ended up hanging out quite a bit in North Carolina, and I got to know him. I really like him... Sacha's like a provocateur. That's what he does for a living. He's not really an actor or a comedian - he's someone who's put on this Earth to stir up trouble... all the time. Everyone knows how brilliant Sacha is. MPM: Was shooting a film that takes a fun look at NASCAR in North Carolina, in the sport's home turf, provocative in and of itself?
John C. Reilly: It's a comedy, and it makes fun of the characters that are in it. I think it actually ends up being a kind of homage to the sport in a way, like, I guess, whatever the first football comedy to come out - The Longest Yard or North Dallas Forty, or one of those movies. And you've kind of arrived when people start satirizing you. I think it says that NASCAR has finally seeped into the consciousness of America. People have to know what something is before you can make a comedy out of it, I think. Someone told me that MASCAR is now the second most popular sport now, after football, in America. It's definitely got its roots in the redneck Southern culture, but it's definitely moved beyond that. The sport has grown a lot since Days of Thunder [the 1990 Tom Cruise starrer]. Because we had so much money on Days of Thunder, we re-created almost everything. They shot second unit photography on some of the races, but for the most part everything was re-created. It's funny, on this movie I got to know the whole NASCAR scene a lot better, because we were shooting during real races and interacting with a lot of the race teams and the drivers and the fans. I think this movie's gonna be more up their alley than Days was. Days of Thunder has its fans, but it was very mythic; there wasn't anything that a real race fan could lock onto. MPM: When you styled your character, Cal, did you base him on existing NASCAR personalities or did you start from scratch and just build up the sideburns? Did you find yourself listening to Southern music?
John C. Reilly: My look was sort of an amalgamation of some of the more famous guys that you hear stories about. My character's more like a throwback compared to what the drivers are really like now. Like, you can't really find a driver with facial hair at this point [laughs]; there used to be the odd mustache and sideburns, and now they're all pretty clean-cut. They look like jockeys almost, these little guys - super muscular and clean-cut, young and all-American looking. Yeah, I decided to go for the look of the old Richard Petty and those sorts of guys - more of the renegade. Y'know... this is what I discovered on this movie: As soon as you try to peg something as NASCAR - "This is a NASCAR fan" or "This is NASCAR music" - you soon realize there's no such thing; it's really a fool's errand. According to old preconceptions, you can decide what is a NASCAR fan or NASCAR music, but being out there working, you realize that it isn't really that way. MPM: Were you given as much license to improvise on this movie as, say, Boogie Nights, where PT Anderson would scribe "John and Mark [Wahlberg] do karate moves here"?
John C. Reilly: Yeah; probably more. I think I've had more freedom on this movie than anything I've ever done, actually. Will and Adam have such a comfort level with each other and they wrote the script, so it wasn't like they needed to check with the writer to see whether it was going to make sense. We'd do the scripted version once or twice and then almost immediately start riffing on whatever the material was. MPM: With this film, the Mike White film Year of the Dog and Quebec all coming up, it seems that you've made a conscious choice to focus on comedies now. Is that right or is it just the way things have happened?
John C. Reilly: I've always wanted to do more comedies, but that wasn't what was coming my way early on, for whatever reason. I'm happy that it is that way now. People want to make comedies more now; there are more of them being done. I wish I could say it was a conscious decision because I wish I could say I could choose the way my career is going to go every year, but the fact is most actors are just taking opportunities. MPM: What's your opinion on the adage that a comedic role is harder to do well than a dramatic role?
John C. Reilly: I don't think it's true. I think they're both the same thing, actually. You commit to the circumstances, whatever they are. If the circumstances are a little more absurd, then you're in a comedy; if they're a little more realistic, then I guess you're in a drama. MPM: You've told me you're still trying to get a musical based on the Borgnine film Marty up on Broadway and you've made it known you'd love to be involved in a remake of Guys and Dolls. Do you think the momentum engaged for Hollywood musicals by Moulin Rouge and Chicago has subdued somewhat?
John C. Reilly: I don't know. Rob Marshall probably could have made three more movie musicals in a row if he wanted to. People would have given him the money, but he had other fish to fry and I respect that. And there wasn't any momentum before those films came out and they did just fine without any momentum. Part of what made those movies the success they were was the innovative take the directors had. They both tried to do something new and fresh, whereas the movie of The Producers was much more traditional, sort of a stage musical on screen, and maybe there is not as much interest in that now. MPM: If films affect society, then what is the most important work you've done?
John C. Reilly: Depends on what you think is important. Depends on what the viewer brings to it. I don't know that films really affect society; I think films reflect society, reflect where we're at at the time. I suppose they can have an affect if people look at a movie and see their own lives reflected in it. I don't know, I think people affect society more than any piece of art does. | 
