What was the appeal of remaking Frank Capra's 1936 pic "Mr Deeds Goes to Town"?
I really liked the story. The idea of someone waking up one day, getting $40 billion and not thinking "Wow!" I love the idea that there are happy people out there who aren't driven by money, and I think it's a really interesting idea for a movie. For a long time I haven't seen a movie where the character remains true throughout the entire story. I remember a movie with Peter Sellers called "Being There" [1979] where the central character remains the same - it's the other people around him that change, which I thought was a cool concept.
Are you a fan of Frank Capra's movies?
I do like Capra's movies, but that wasn't the reason I wanted to do the movie. I wasn't trying to better Frank Capra, Adam [Sandler] and I, we're just using the original movie as the idea behind our own comedy. Some of the values in the older movie are the exact same as we have today, and stuff about the corporate corruption that is happening in America now is very relevant.
What was it like to be reunited with Adam Sandler?
We weren't reunited because we never split. We only spent a week apart after finishing "Little Nicky", and the very next week we started writing "Mr Deeds", so it's like we've been making one long movie for three years.
How did you and Adam meet?
I met Adam 13 years ago when he and I were acting in a movie called "Going Overboard". At the time he was doing stand-up and I used to go see him. I always thought he was very funny and we became good friends. After doing our own stuff for a while, we came up with the idea for "Little Nicky", which we both wrote and I directed. We have a great working relationship because we both have a great love of comedy and share the same sense of humour.
How did you get Winona Ryder onboard?
Well, Winona actually approached us, she was dying to work with me. Only joking. It was my dream to work with Winona, and we thought she'd be ideal for the role as she has that classic old-style actress look about her, plus she really wanted to do a comedy as she doesn't often get offered those kind of roles and we were confident she could pull it off.
She didn't feature on the US poster for the movie, was that a conscious decision because of the ongoing allegations against her?
I don't think it's a matter of her bad publicity that they chose not to put her on the poster, and I don't think her being on it would affect the movie either. I think people tend to separate actors' private lives from their acting, and hopefully think of her as the actress and the character she's playing when watching her. But saying that, I don't know the reason she's not on it because I didn't pick the posters, that's handled by the distributors.
