Jim Carrey and Tea Leoni in Fun With Dick and Jane, now showing at the multiplexes

Producer Brian Grazer has enjoyed enormous success in his collaborations with superstar Jim Carrey. Their films together, Liar Liar and How The Grinch Stole Christmas, were gigantic box-office hits and they have been on the lookout ever since for another project.

Carrey and his management team had been contemplating a remake of the 1977 comedy Fun With Dick and Jane starring Jane Fonda and George Segal. They thought its themes had contemporary relevance ? a family-oriented comedy that deals with the pitfalls of chasing the elusive American dream set against the backdrop of massive corporate greed.

?One day Jim came to me with this great idea to update Fun With Dick and Jane. It not only had great comic potential but seemed torn from the headlines,? observes Grazer. ?He asked if I would be willing to produce it. I jumped at the chance.?

The film, released last Friday, is running at all the multiplexes in town.

While it?s told from a uniquely contemporary perspective, the movie?s themes also echoed the great comedies of the 1930s, the golden age of Hollywood. ?When I initially met with everyone about remaking this movie,? says director Dean Parisot, who had made the sleeper hit comedy Galaxy Quest, ?I was especially intrigued with how the plight of this couple might play itself out now, at the beginning of the 21st century. By updating this story and putting it in the context of an Enron-like disaster, I thought there was great potential for a new, original, and very funny take on this material.?

For the right Jane, the filmmakers wanted someone who could keep up with Carrey?s highly eclectic and daring improvisation in scene after scene. ?She had to have the agility of a physical comedian and the right chemistry with Jim so that the audience would believe Dick and Jane have been together in a loving marriage for 10 years,? says Grazer.

?Tea Leoni was the perfect candidate,? says Carrey, ?because I had seen her comic work in Flirting With Disaster and thought she was tremendous. She?s one of the best actresses working today, so she could bring a tone of reality to the relationship. She has an adventurous spirit and a nervous vulnerability about her that I think makes her exciting and sexy, as well as endearing.?

?The astounding thing about working with Jim is that most of my job entails setting up the scene and then stepping back to watch him play in it,? says Parisot.

?The fact that I also had Tea, who could go anywhere Jim went in her own very original and funny way, was a huge bonus. They worked so well together as a comic couple. Their chemistry was absolutely perfect. Jim has the ability to turn on a dime and try things from all kinds of different perspectives and Tea was right there with him.?

For Leoni, Fun With Dick and Jane was a crash course in improvisational comedy. She and Carrey met only one week before shooting began and there was little time to rehearse. ?I was just terrified,? she laughs. ?For me, shooting without a rehearsal period is like the first day of school and you?ve been told that you don?t have your knickers on. But it also made it very exciting.?

A scene in which Dick and Jane plan a robbery disguised as Sonny and Cher is one of Leoni?s favourites because of its wacky evolution. ?Originally, I was going to be Cher,? she explains, ?but since Jim is 6-foot-2, it made sense for him to be Cher. I fit into Sonny?s costume perfectly ? no alterations were needed!?

The natural chemistry between Leoni and Carrey also helped in the depiction of Dick and Jane?s reinvigorated sex life, mentions Parisot.

?When they start robbing banks they spend more time together and they?re doing something together as a couple that has a wild, almost sexual excitement to it. They feel guilty about it and yet they?re excited at the same time.?

Fun With Dick and Jane was shot entirely in Southern California, beginning on a set in Rancho Palos Verdes where a subdivision of 12 houses was constructed for Dick and Jane?s neighbourhood. Other locations included a house in Los Angeles? Hancock Park which interestingly was also used in Carrey?s very first movie Once Bitten. The health club where Jane teaches Tae Bo is 24-Hour Fitness in Woodland Hills in the San Fernando Valley.