Screenwriting 101: Peter Farrelly

“My goal always has been to write a comedy that could also make people feel something emotionally. All our comedies have a touch of, I’ll say, substance to them — and I’ll underline “a touch.” We’ve never really gotten heavy. But even Dumb & Dumber, which is a very broad comedy, has that moment at the beginning where Jim Carrey is trying to talk Jeff Daniels into going to Aspen. Jim looks out the window and says, “I have nobody, I have nothing” and he plays it straight and he works up a tear. Our feeling is that you need three-dimensional characters for our type of comedy to work, because if you don’t, you’ll get bored and the movie will die halfway in.”

— Peter Farrelly, “Creative Screenwriting” magazine, Nov/Dec, 2001