INT: Number 23 1/2

The
23 enigma is the belief that all incidents and events connect in
some way to the number 23. To
believers, this would include the day of Shakespeare’s birth and
death (April 23rd, 1564 and 1616) and the day Adolf Hitler tried to
seize power (January 23rd). There
are many more interesting facts which I would suggest that if you
have an interest in the number and the movie, or just want to laugh
at conspiracy theorists, it’s worth a Google.
Is it all a coincidence? Well,
if it is, it has become the fascination of many, and it also raised
my interest. So it is a wonder
that it took this long to make a movie about it.
And for Joel Schumacher’s 23rd film, he takes on THE
NUMBER 23 with Jim Carrey, Virginia Madsen and Danny Huston.
It is a strange and intriguing psychological thriller about
obsession and one man’s descent into everything surrounding the
magical number.

Recently,
at the Press Conference for the film, Joel,
Jim
,
Virginia
and Danny all stopped by to say hello at The Four Seasons in

Beverly Hills

. For a movie surrounded by
the mystery of a numerical fascination, there was a very
lighthearted mood in the room. Jim
Carrey is a very funny man in person and surprisingly mellow.
There was very little over-the-top, make em’ laugh humor.
He seems to have settled into a serious actor with comic
overtones, and the dude has let his hair grow and looked pretty cool
[Is this because of Jenny McCarthy?].

Alongside
Jim was a very beautiful and charming Virginia Madsen, whom yours
truly has been a major fan of for a very long time, CANDYMAN
people!!! Add to that Mr. Joel
Schumacher and Danny Huston [John’s son] and you get a very funny
hour of talk about THE NUMBER 23 and much more.

Part
1 of 2

Jim Carrey	Virginia Madsen	Joel Schumacher

Virginia
Madsen (VM): [Referring to the microphone in front of Jim Carrey]
Why does Jim have the biggest one?

Jim
Carrey (JC): That’s a question they’ve been asking for years

Before
you started this movie you knew about this phenomenon because you
named your company JC23, are you thinking of changing that now?

JC:
No, never.

What
did you know about it then that you would want to name your company
JC23?

JC:
Well you see it started out for me, a friend of mine in

Canada

kind of handed it down to me. He was seeing it everywhere, adding up
license plates, doing all these things. He had a book full of 23
phenomenon and he handed it to me, and I said he was crazy and then
I started seeing it everywhere. And then one day, a few years later
after it had kind of entered my life in a big way and I was driving
my friends crazy, somebody handed me a book on the 23^rd
Psalm, the valley of the shadow of death, living without fear
basically, knowing you’re taken care of, so I thought that was a
great progression from Pit Bull productions, which is kind of like
grabbing hold of life and just not letting it go, to not sweating
it.

Joel
Schumacher (JS): And ripping other people’s throats out.

JC:
Exactly. So I named the company that, and then I explained it to a
friend and he said, ‘Well, I just read a script called ‘The
Number 23’ and I said, ‘I have to see this.’ And I read the
script, I was compelled by it, and I was freaked out actually
because the first page of the script was actually originally me
trying to capture a pit bull. So the Pit Bull Productions to JC23
was not lost there and it went on like that. Then he read it and I
came back into the room, a friend of mine I gave it to, and he had
turned to the 23^rd page and was circling every 23^rd
word because he was looking for a code. And that’s what I want to
do with the audience with a movie like this. That’s the fun of it.

Has
anyone else ever heard of this phenomenon?

VM:
Yes, because I think all that stuff is really fun — the shows on
the Discovery Channel about ghosts and the yeti and UFOs, which I
totally believe in. So I’d heard about it but I didn’t know how
vast it was until really the first day of production. I’d sort of
been on line, and I came in and there were these beautiful,
beautiful roses from Jim, these enormous [roses] with this romantic
note, to my beautiful wife.

JC:
I just didn’t want any trouble.

VM:
And you know, I was so gullible. I was like, ‘Oh, I love him
now.’ That’s all it takes. But then on the table there was this
book about this thick with all the fun facts about the number 23,
just in case you’re a doubter. So I was like, ‘Oh my God.’

JC:
And then it began, and her son started picking out things. Her son
was sitting there all day long trying to figure out the phenomenon
on the set. And he pointed out that our names together were 23
letters [Referring to him and Virginia] and our names together
[referring to him and Schumacher] are 23 letters.

VM:
And it’s his 23^rd film [Referring to Schumacher].

JS:
It’s my 23^rd film.

Did
weird things happen on the set?

JS:
Well, I hired Danny and Virginia. I asked them to participate in the
movie and then the first day of shooting I found out they had been
married once.

VM:
23 years ago!

JS:
Right. And I asked them if they would have a problem doing a sex
scene together?

JC:
We’re trying to keep them apart right now.

JS:
I thought that was kind of, as Jim would say, ‘whooo.’ We had
weird stuff happening every day.

JC:
By the way, watch the Super Bowl. Keep your eye on Devin Hester.

So
Jim, playing an animal catcher, do you feel you’ve come full
circle from Ace

Ventura

?

JC:
Well, again, this is the way my life and the universe works
basically is very mysterious. Movies
find me, and I kind of just allow them to find me, and when it
becomes a real good fit, I do them. And in this case it was the 23
phenomenon, and also the fact that he was a dog catcher was I think
a really nice little wink toward my other work, so it was just all
inclusive.

Jim
staying on that frame of mind, you were very intense in this movie,
is this going to start another direction in the way your career is
going? I think this movie proves you’re the real McCoy when it
comes to doing serious roles

.

JC:
Thanks very much, I appreciate that. Well, you know, I really have
always thought of myself as somebody who lives in the middle of the
wheel and is able to go to the extreme, to the outside of the wheel
in any direction, so that’s kind of my… The best case scenario
for me is to be able to be centered and then go out and you can be
zany and funny or you can do something that really has some depth to
it and serious. So there’s many different colors to paint with,
and I would hate to get trapped in one little thing. I always feel
like funny is an appendage, but it is not my whole body.

Which
persona did you see yourself in – Fabrizia or Agatha?

VM:
Well, I definitely… Agatha,
but I mean, all of us have a dark side and all of us have an even
darker side to our sexuality, and it was to tap into that.
Everything that I play as an actress is a different aspect of me
sort of being able to unlock that little door and show that. This
movie was great because I just got to show a lot of different sides.

Danny
Huston (DH): What was interesting was to play a character that in a
sense is an extension of Jim’s character’s paranoia so you are
in a way playing yourself but you’re also playing what Jim is
feeling you are.

JS:
Especially in the book.

DH:
Exactly and also existing in this film noir gothic world that Joel
has created.

JS:
You like sort of being the Casanova kid actor a lot.

DH:
Don’t I! [Schumacher laughs] As far as the number’s concerned,
it just… I liken it to occasionally dabbling in gambling from time
to time. You have a certain affection towards numbers and the moment
the affection exists, you can’t help but find these coincidences
everywhere. The superstition in a way is very contagious. After I
saw the screening of the film the first time, a black cat crossed in
front of me and I stopped immediately. Could that have something to
do with the film? Has the film cursed me? And so you start to spin
out. And that’s what was interesting from an acting point of view.

JC:
Is it a good thing or a bad thing?

DH:
Yeah.

JC:
But it does get inside you a little bit.

DH:
It gets you. Yeah.

JC:
Hitchcock was wonderful in his approach to things. He would make you
look at something normal in a completely way. Like in “The
Birds,” it was like you could never look at birds the same way.

JS:
Or the shower.

JC:
Yeah, the shower, exactly. It tapped into some kind of weird little
bugaboo that everybody has, the fear of what’s on the other side
of that curtain.

JS:
I could never dress up like my mother after that.

JC:
Yeah, you had to let that go. (laughs)

JS:
Got to let it go. (laughs) And that was such a great housedress too.

Jim
you didn’t answer which character were you…

JC:
Which character was I? All of the above.

Which
did you feel the most comfortable being?

JC:
Well I love Walter because he’s the family guy. He’s the guy who
wants to have a normal life. He’s most of us who want just things
to be stable. We’re in a constant state of denial that we live on
plates of rock that are floating on molten magma and nothing is
stable in the universe. We just want to keep things from moving too
much or changing too much. So I like that character. He was very
loving with his family and he loved his job. But the other character
was a little bit different for me to play so that’s exciting for
me.

JS:
But you fell in love with playing Fingerling.

JC:
I did like Fingerling, and Jenny (McCarthy) liked it.

VM:
I know, she did.

JC:
It’s weird. It’s amazing what a tattoo does for a girl.

JS:
I don’t know if Billy’s here, Billy Corso was the make up
artist, but Jim and Billy stayed up all one night in the trailer and
invented that tattoo.

VM:
I was so pleased.

JC:
That was the reaction. It was hilarious because…

JS:
It was so fabulous. I loved it. He thought I wouldn’t like it for
some reason. He didn’t think I was hip enough to like this tattoo.

JC:
That’s the villain.

JS:
That’s what they told me.

JC:
We didn’t know if you could get it. And he just went off for like
three weeks he rubbed that one in. [Imitating Schumacher] ‘Yes,
well, I have done some hip things in my day.’ That thing just
drove us crazy. But, yeah, I wanted to approach it right, so I came
up to Joel and I said, ‘I wanted to tell you Joel that I know
we’re doing the scene with the shirt off today, and I have this
tattoo, and Billy and I are used to covering it up so if you don’t
want to use it, that’s totally cool. We’ll just use it for
something else,’ and I took my shirt off and he went, ‘That
can’t be real!’ [Laughs]

JS:
I didn’t say that. I said ‘I love it!’

JC:
Yeah, ‘I love it, it’s in the film.’ I said, ‘Seriously we
can cover it up.’ He said, ‘It’s in the film.’ And

Virginia

was just standing there like this [Gives a blasé look]. She was
just standing there looking wistful, so I knew it was working.

Can
you describe it and how they put it on, and if you had to have it on
for weeks at a time?

JC:
Billy painted it, originally painted it on, and so we got on the
computer and played around with photo shop and just did a mock up of
it, and then I stood there and he painted it on me. We were there
‘til like four or five in the morning downtown in the middle of
nowhere, but it was so great. It turned out really cool, and then he
worked it out so he came up with this process where he could
actually do little pieces of a decal kind of thing where he could
stick it on. It still took awhile, but he’s just amazing.

JS:
And because a lot of the Fingerling world is so graphic and black
and white and red, it was perfect. It was perfect to set up a lot
of… and

Virginia

is in the black wig and mostly black underwear I’d say. [Laughing]
Fabrizia doesn’t get dressed a lot.

VM:
No, I recall one scene where I am just walking out and I just take
my coat — like leave with the lingerie.

JC:
And the interesting thing too is that our relationship in the two
different worlds. It’s like, when I kiss her as my wife, as
Walter, it’s loving and sweet and it’s beautiful, and when we
are together as Fabrizia and Fingerling, it’s angry and it’s
basically…

JS:
Blood is exchanged.

JC:
It’s biting and it’s eating. It’s consuming the other person.
It’s pretty interesting.

VM:
Yeah. [Laughing]

Jim,
can I just ask you, do you have any tattoos? Do you want to have
any?

JC:
I like to start in the center. [Laughing] No.

Jim,
is there anything that you’re obsessed with or that really
consumes you?

JC:
The only thing that has ever really consumed me is love from time to
time. Feeling like,
‘What is it? How do I get it?’ You know, all of those things
have consumed my mind from time to time. The rest of it is… my
spiritual journey has been a good kind of thing that I’ve been on,
I guess some people would say I’m obsessed with, but in a really
good way. It’s just enjoyable. I don’t really have crazy
obsessions about things.

JS:
I think you are more seeking in that. I don’t think you’re
obsessional. I think you are seeking. I think you’re a pupil.
You’re a student.

JC:
I think obsessions happen because you’re trying to understand
something or some urge. Like in the film, I believe it’s trying to
avoid something.

JS:
Well, there are also magnificent obsessions and there are tragic,
evil obsessions. So obsession can be a great thing and it can also
destroy lives as we’ve seen.

Since
you brought up Jenny [McCarthy] earlier…

JC:
Oh, I did it. [Laughing] I see. Can we just take some personal
responsibility for the question you’re about to ask?

JS:
You opened the door as they’d say in the Supreme Court.

JC:
This is your fault that I’m going to ask you something. [Laughing]

You
talked about being on this spiritual journey. I mean obviously when
you’re in love, you’re in a difference place anyway. Being with
her, do you feel closer to that good place that you’re trying to
get to?

JC:
I feel that our relationship happened at a time that I am more ready
than I have ever been in my life to have a relationship.

JS:
This is the happiest I’ve ever seen Jim and we’ve been friends
for a really long time.

JC:
And we also encourage each other and we’re both on the same path,
so it’s really nice.

JS:
And I’ve seen you when you’ve been really suffering in love.

For
the role of Fingerling, did you look at any noir characters in the
past or from other film noir movies to get an inspiration for his
personality and how he acts?

JC:
No, I didn’t really. I thought that if I was in that position, if
I was that guy, how I would see myself and how it would basically
bleed into your hair and into your eyes and into everything about
you. The coat, all the choices are choices that somebody makes
because of what’s going on in their spirit, you know. Every choice
we make is based on that. The colors we wear, everything. It just
bleeds into everything. It starts with a lie the person believes
about themselves or the delusion they are living with or the pain
that they’ve kind of accumulated, the things they aren’t dealing
with. It all creeps out in certain ways. It’s fascinating.

JS:
I think that it was more original than the usual noir cop.
Because when you see a cop, especially in a black coat like
that in a noir setting, you expect them to be the cynical, burnt
out, alcoholic, corrupt cop.

JC:
We didn’t want him to be a life hater.

JS:
But you see Walter, since it’s Walter’s delusion that has
created this, there’s… I think the first time you see him is
when he meets Fabrizia and you see one side of him. But when he goes
to see the suicide blonde that Lynn Collins plays so brilliantly,
there is a real compassion there, because of course, in Walter’s
life his mother committed suicide and it’s the same actress who
played his mother and the widow Dobkins and all that, because it’s
all in his consciousness somewhere and subconsciousness.

So,
I think you can see in that scene how much he wants for her to have
a better life than she’s giving herself. And I think that’s what
is different about it. It’s
not, ‘Life is shit. Everyone is shit. I’m on the take.’ And I
think that’s the difference that Jim brought to it because it had
Walter’s spirit in it somewhere.

Jim,
your character is in good shape. Did you do something special for
this role? And did you
play the saxophone at all? Your character looks like he’s playing
the saxophone but we never hear it.

JC:
You’re so lucky. [Laughing] I
really just practiced some rudimentary things that I could do that
would match the music, but I didn’t learn how to play the sax. I
used to play the sax, oddly enough. See there are parallels all over
the place. My father was an accountant, OK. He played the saxophone
in a band. He had an orchestra. He played the saxophone. So, there
were these parallels. I don’t know how many of them were actually
in there already.

JS:
Tons. Yes, tons.

JC:
So there were all these parallels going on anyway. I played in the
school band but I forgot how to play it.

JS:
I didn’t want to stop the movie for saxophone interludes.
[Laughing]

JC:
No, no, nobody really wanted to see that.

JS:
We had a lot of story to tell and the saxophone was one little tiny
detail.

JC:
Exactly and I try to stay in decent shape always. I pride myself on
staying at least a month away from really good shape for something.

JS:
The only reason I asked Jim to play the Riddler is he was the only
person who could have worn that green elastic, spandex suit. He’s
always been in great shape.

JC:
That was on the thin side, that one.

JS:
And he did all his own stunts in BATMAN FOREVER too because there is
no one who can do Jim’s body language.

JC:
It’s the weirdest thing. There are so many times I’m in
positions where we try to double me in things and it can be
literally the back of my body, like the back of my head or
something, and they just go, ‘It just doesn’t look like him.’
[Laughing] I don’t know. There is something about my posture or
something. I have no idea what it is.

JS:
It’s body language.

Speaking
of parallels, Jim, did you know that Hamilton, Ontario, Canada is 23
keystrokes on a computer?

JC:
No, I didn’t know that. [Laughing]

We
got you!

VM:
Oh God. [Laughing]

Would
you go back there at all?

JC:
Yeah, sure, absolutely. Yeah, Burlington.

Would
you go back there now knowing that there are 23 letters?

JC:
Tomorrow, yeah, absolutely. Well, you know, it’s all working.

JS:
23 can bring good too.

JC:
Yeah, it’s not a bad thing. It’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Is
Hamilton a good thing or a bad thing?

JC:
It’s a good thing, man. It’s a tough town. It’s a tough
town, steel town you know.

What
do you remember about it?

JC:
Just that and good people. I had a great time. I lived in Burlington
for about eight years right across the bay. And I basically thought
I was going to be working in Dofasco. I was basically, that was
where I was going, so if the career in show business hadn’t panned
out, I was looking for a job in one of the steel mills because they
were the great jobs.

JS:
We always have to have a back up plan. I had many. I still have one.

JC:
Yeah, totally. I worked in Richmond Hill in a lot of the factories
there and in many different factory jobs so I was kind of headed in
that direction.

JS:
Especially when you do stand up, you never know what is going to
happen.

JC:
Right, yeah. But the 23 thing, I just wanted to point out there is a
double 32 on this. [Picking up a digital recorder]

VM
That’s what he was showing me. I was like, ‘Oh my God!’

JC:
I wanted to show you also this because the other day when I came a
couple of days ago, I was with my assistant and I wanted people to
see what I see everyday. So basically I started saying, ‘Just get
your camera phone out and start taking pictures whenever you see
it.’ [He shows a series of photographs] So this was the first
thing, the tow truck right besides us with the number 23 on the side
of it. I didn’t photo shop this. I don’t know why that is, the
number 23 on the side.

I
guess it’s the 23^rd truck or something in their fleet.
I don’t know what it is. So, I got them to take a picture of that.
Then I looked to the car in front of us and that license plate
started with 23. Then I got to the hotel room here and I was in
1223. Then I went out on my balcony and the address adjacent to the
hotel is 323 if you want to see it when you leave. And then I
ordered some breakfast [Shows photo of bowl of cereal with number 23
floating on top in the milk]. [Laughing]
I mean, c’mon. Tell me that’s a coincidence. Tell me
*that* is a coincidence. I mean look at that, man. That’s freaky.
That’s eerie. [Schumacher
and Carrey hum an eerie note together] OK, that last one was a joke,
but the rest of them are real. The rest of them are real.

JS:
A lot of them in the movie are real too. There is a website where
people for years have been taking photos of the number 23 all over
the planet. Why they do this, we don’t know, but I mean, you’ll
see there are a lot of great photos of it. Some of them are in the
movie. But the afternoon
that Jim called me and said, ‘Are you going to do this movie The
Number 23?’ And I said, ‘Why?’ And he said, ‘Well, if you do
it, I’ll do it.’ And I said, ‘Well if you do it, I’ll do
it.’

And
then that night I was really excited about it and it was about
midnight and I’m brushing my teeth and I’m thinking, ‘Boy,
I’ve made a lot of movies. This would be my 20^th movie
and Jim and I have been wanting to work together.’ And I said,
“Gee I wish it was number 23.’ And I’m brushing away and then
suddenly the other side of my brain says, ‘What about your three
television movies.’ (Laughs) ‘Wouldn’t
this be your 23^rd directing job?’
And I remember I had a houseguest and I ran across the house
and I knocked on the door. Eli was there with his girlfriend. And I
said, ‘Eli!’ and he was fast asleep, and he was like, ‘Huh?’
and I said, ‘Guess what? This will be my 23^rd film.’
And he went, ‘Um, yeah, okay man.’
[Laughing]

JC:
That’s great man!

JS:
So I couldn’t wait for the next morning to call Jim.

JC:
Here is an example of something. I’m on the internet, IM’ing
somebody, a friend of mine about changing the name of my company to
JC23 and why I did it, about the valley of the shadow of death.
At that very moment that I typed those words, a friend of
mine walks into the room with a newspaper that on the front page is
a giant picture of Death Valley and it says, ‘Death Valley
Blooms’ and Death Valley was blooming for the first time in 100
years because of that extraordinary amount of rain we had that year
and these seeds had been lying dormant for 100 years and suddenly it
was all flowers.

And
he was like, ‘We gotta go on a motorcycle trip man.’ And I was
like, ‘Here we go. It’s leading me on some weird journey
again.’ And so we got on the motorcycles, did a three-day trip
through Death Valley, and came back, and the day we got back the
Pope died at 2:37 eastern standard time — 23 which is the valley of
the shadow of death and 7 which is the number of completion in the
bible. Everything is based on 7 in the bible. Starts and ends with
7. Pretty trippy.

Come
back tomorrow for PART 2…