The school of soft knocks

Since American Pie’s unfeasibly gigantic success, the last few years have witnessed an explosion in the amount of similarly-spirited Porky’s Revenge homages released. Most of them, from Dude Where’s My Car to Van Wilder, have been dreadful beyond description, but the new comedy Old School has a good-natured charm to it that happily offsets the usual genre excesses.

The film features Luke Wilson, Will Ferrell and Vince Vaughn as three overgrown juveniles in their thirties who re-unite to recreate their frat-boy college years, with predictably dumb but goofily amusing results.

“Yeah, we didn’t expect for a minute that it would be a critics’ favorite,” Ferrell cheerfully confirms. “But it got a better critical review generally than we thought, believe it or not. It got trashed by the odd newspaper, but there seemed to be a guilty pleasure factor at work, and a consensus that it was pretty well made for the kind of movie that it is.”

Ferrell, relatively obscure over here, has been well known Stateside for some time as one of the primary writers and comics on NBC’s Saturday Night Live, on which he regularly performed unflattering impersonations of George W. Bush. His temerity in attacking the Commander-in-Chief seems to have had no ill effect as yet.

“Well, I only played him when I was on Saturday Night Live, and this is my first year since I’ve left the show, so I haven’t really had to deal with that so much. There was a little brief period right after 9/11 where it was kinda weird for comedy in the States, what was appropriate and what was not. And then it just got right back on track.

“If you see the Bush act, it isn’t that controversial, I don’t know if it’s scathing so much as it’s fair and consistent with everyone thay make fun of. The guy was a pretty handy target, and what we did was make fun of the perceptions, which were that he’s not the most articulate guy in the world, and seems not to be the most intelligent guy in the world. But in terms of negative reaction, there was nothing at all, people loved it. I think even people who like Bush got a kick out of it. And doing some sketches during the run-off with Al Gore after the election, I got criticised by some people who felt I’d made Bush almost too likeable.”

Another of the film’s stars, Luke Wilson, has gathered plenty of attention with roles in Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums, both of which also featured his brother Owen, who co-wrote both films with their director Wes Anderson. Often identified as part of a new-wave Hollywood mafia that also seems to include Ben Stiller, Ferrell and his brother, Wilson denies involvement in any great plot.

“I don’t know if we’ve taken over, there’s just a phenomenon where certain directors, like Wes or Paul Thomas Anderson who are kinda the leading indie guys right now, they like to work with the same people the way Robert Altman or Scorsese did. I’m not comparing them – but the way it is with these guys now, they can work with the people they like, they’re not directors that get hired onto somebody else’s projects by some studio head.”

Was he a fan of the Porky’s movies?

“I was a fan of Animal House, not so much Porky’s, but National Lampoon did good stuff. One of the things I really liked about Old School was there was no mean feeling about it. So many of these movies are so mean and sneering and semi-hateful and nasty to women. Old school isn’t misogynistic. It’s about a struggle with sustained adolescence.”

Did the soaraway success of Legally Blonde, in which Wilson starred, surprised him?

“God, yeah. It’s bizarre, I keep going into stores and little ten-year-old girls will start swarming around me, staring right at me, going ‘are you the guy from Legally Blonde?’ before their parents come up to me and say ‘You know, she’s seen it three hundred times’. When kids love a movie, they really love it.”

Meanwhile, Will Ferrell remains both surprised and disappointed at the lukewarm reception afforded Ben Stiller’s Zoolander, in which he played a poncy fashion designer.

“That’s a perfect example of not being able to predict how things will turn out – I went and saw it and nearly put a down-payment on a speedboat. I called Stiller and told him this was going to be the next Austin Powers, the audience had seemed to love it, there was a sense about it.

“Then it came out two weeks after 9/11, and I watched it in a theatre with a New York crowd on opening night, and you could tell the feeling wasn’t right. They were really enjoying it, but no-one had licence, no-one felt like they could let loose and laugh really hard. So it came out it at a weird time, and even if it hadn’t it ws maybe too specific a film.”