Technician’s Morgan McCormick, along with reporters from other local newspapers, sat down with comedian Will Ferrell to talk about his latest movie, as well as his Web site. He also got to chat with Kent Alterman, the director of Ferrell’s latest film.

Technician: What effect do you think your Web site, Funny or Die, and YouTube will have on the future of comedy? I mean, instead of comedy just naturally occurring, those preserve it for everyone’s use.

Ferrell: In terms of Funny or Die our value is just specifically about comedy and YouTube you can just post anything. It’s so wide that it becomes mind-numbing in terms of what you want to search for… I don’t know if we’ll all get used to YouTube one day and be bored with it or if it will continue to flourish, same with Funny or Die.

Neil Morris, Sanford Herald: Isn’t Semi-Pro less of a parody of basketball and more of a parody of a time and place?

Ferrell: That’s a really good observation. It is, it’s really the parody of this league, the ABA, which a lot of people don’t realize is a real league. It’s not a movie about us playing bad basketball but more about this insane league. When you read accounts of the ABA you can’t believe the stories, you can’t believe it actually survived for nine years. I mean it was behind the eight ball the entire time and it was a larger than life cast of characters and personalities that drove that thing and that’s what we’re parodying.

Joe Scott, News & Record: Don’t a lot of your movies have sad content if you just spin it a different way? The end of the ABA, decline of journalism and parenting. Do you think your comedies poke fun at the excess of being American?

Ferrell: We only set out to make just funny movies. At the same time, not getting too grandiose, we do…definitely [comment on] American excess. We love playing around with that as an undercurrent. Hopefully it sneaks up on you a little later, because it’s not obvious to a lot of people at first. Yeah, that’s fascinating to me, that’s a tone we need to continue to comment on. We need to keep it in check as lot of us don’t seem to care.

Technician: I was a big fan of Winter Passing and Stranger Than Fiction. Do you see yourself doing more of those in the future?

Ferrell: I’d love to do more films like that, but I never want to be guilty of forcing that issue — I’m not the comedian with the agenda: ‘Please, I’m begging you to take me seriously.’ It’s so much fun to do super-intense movies and take on those challenges, but I love doing comedy too. But I just kind of take it as it comes.

Zachary Smith, Independent Weekly: What works about your collaboration with Adam McKay? [Ferrell and McKay founded Funny or Die and are working on the movie Step Brothers together]

Ferrell: There’s not a lot of judgment, in terms of spewing out ideas. I mean, you can work with people who are kind of like, “Mmm, I don’t think that works,” but we’re just like “Great, jot it down. You know, this may be a crazy idea, but no, write that down too.” We just kind of like to work fast and messy and clean it up all there. We found at SNL, we love to write sketches as fast we could and we’d take about an hour whereas a lot of people would take all night long and we could never figure out why, how that worked. Eight hours on a sketch or one hour — it came out about the same.

Kent Alterman, the director of Semi-Pro, entered after Ferrell left.

Technician: Were you a fan of the ABA?

Alterman: I grew up in San Antonio, so I was kid when they brought the Spurs from Dallas in the original ABA days. In San Antonio, there were three main investors, but they opened it up to the town for people to invest in, so my father, my uncle and a friend of theirs kind of pulled together I think about $600 each and they bought one share of the team, so we had season tickets at midcourt in the third row and I went to all the games and I was kind of a loudmouthed, smartass kid just making myself known.

Neil Morris, Sanford Herald: What made Flint, Michigan so emblematic for you [as the setting for Semi-Pro]?

Alterman: Well all the teams except the Flint Tropics are real — did you all see the movie already?

Everyone: Yes.

Alterman: Did you like it?

Scott: Yeah.

Alterman: Ah, well then I’ll talk to you.

Technician: Well, I liked it more.

Alterman: I knew I could count on the Technician.

[Laughter]

Alterman: Well first of all, I have a personal history with Flint in a vicarious way in that I worked with Michael Moore for a few years on this show called TV Nation and I was directing and producing pieces for that so for those two years I sort of absorbed this affection for Flint from him. And as far as when we were developing the script, there were kind of three main reasons that we picked Flint. One was it’s just sort of the quintessential underground gritty American town, and that seemed to really have resonance with us. And then Jackie Moon’s character is an R&B singer with his one hit wonder, “Love Me Sexy,” and we just really liked the idea that he sort of grew up in the shadow of Motown. And that seemed to have resonance, and then also I just loved the idea that he would have brought this team from somewhere like Tallahassee, Florida, and moved the franchise to Flint but kept the name the Tropics. And not only kept the name, but also in kind of a marketing sense, he tries to infuse a tropical-ness in everything in the franchise. It just seemed very conducive comedically for Will’s character, so that was kind of the inspiration for Flint.