On Movies: He cast his favorite scene-stealers in 'Schmucks'

It's a comedy director's nightmare: the test screening of your new film, and no one in the theater is laughing.

That hasn't happened to Jay Roach, the man behind a string of hilarious hits - three Austin Powers films, Meet the Parents, and Meet the Fockers. But that doesn't mean the anxiety is gone. In fact, he says, it gets worse.

"I think I get more addicted to comedy, and I find myself putting more and more into them each time, partly to compensate for that fear," says Roach, whose latest exercise in absurdity, Dinner for Schmucks - starring Steve Carell and Paul Rudd - opens in theaters Friday.

"I have to figure out a way to have a little more confidence in some of it working," he says, chuckling quietly. "But you know, you just can't tell with comedy. You certainly accumulate all of the best possible assets in terms of cast, and script, and resources, and every possible thing. But it's very difficult to know what's going to work."

He probably doesn't need to worry.

Adapted from Francis Veber's 1998 French farce, The Dinner Game, Roach's version keeps the same squirmy premise - a group of entitled snoots compete to see who can bring the biggest idiot, the biggest buffoon, to the table - but introduces a slew of new characters and scenarios. Aiding and abetting (and doing a mess of improv in the process) are Zach Galifianakis from The Hangover, Jemaine Clement and Kristen Schaal from Flight of the Conchords, David Walliams from Little Britain, and the sublimely wacky (and scary) British actress Lucy Punch. Carell, of course, is the putative schmuck, the loser, an IRS drone who spends his spare time fabricating elaborate dioramas of taxidermied mice in tiny human clothes.

Rudd is an ambitious midlevel financial exec with a pretty girlfriend (Stephanie Szostak), a Porsche he can't afford, and an invitation to attend his boss' soiree of ritual humiliation. When Carell's Barry and Rudd's Tim cross paths, the latter thinks he's found his prize-winning fool.

And the fool thinks he's found a friend.

When it came time to cast Schmucks, which was scripted by David Guion and Michael Handelman, Roach asked himself "who are my favorite performers, who have I been keeping track of lately, and how can I work them into the story?

"It was not accidental that I wanted people who could come onto our set and who could explode - who could completely steal the scenes they were doing, or at least threaten to," he explains.

"Steve and Paul are fantastic, and they have so many scenes alone in Paul Rudd's character's apartment, but almost in that way you do in improv, where you lob a big, story-changing grenade to shake up the improv, we wanted to have these catalysts . . . people that just come in and really make it suddenly more dangerous and more unpredictable.

"And Jemaine is one of those people, and certainly Zach is, and Lucy Punch, oh my gosh, I really loved how she stole that part of the movie. . . . And they're not actually trying to steal anything, they're just being the best version of those characters they can be."

As for Carell, Roach says that his leading doofus developed the character of Barry over a stretch of time, floating and rejecting different ideas before production began.

"He and I had a long lunch early on, a few months before shooting, and he described a guy that I just instantly got. It's somewhat in the original [French] film, but it's a little different," says Roach. "Steve tried to play the character as someone who loves to fill his day with useful activities. He wants to be constructive. He's a pathological optimist - he likes to turn everything into something positive, even really negative things. . . .

"We also thought that when it comes to how Barry should look, that he would never care about style, or really think about his appearance at all. Everything would be about function. . . .

"And then, for comedic purposes, we didn't want him to look too familiar. We wanted the audience to forget that it's the guy from The Office, the guy from The 40 Year Old Virgin. We wanted to transform him, but every attempt we made to transform him too much just seemed really silly. I tried hats and big glasses and goofy wigs, and it never worked. And Steve was the first to always say, 'You know what? Let's just go a little smaller, a little smaller.' And we kept doing that until we got to a fairly simple transformation."

Roach acknowledges, though, that when it came time to shoot, Carell - in his dorky glasses and dorky haircut and dorky clothes - brought something unexpected to the set.

"There was this sort of a facial life, a life on his face, that is different from other characters that I've seen him play. There's almost a childlike thing he's doing with his eyes . . . a kind of earnestness and eagerness and sense of surprise when weird things happen. . . . He brought something else to life that I hadn't quite seen before in anything that Steve had done, this soul in his eyes."

Although Roach's Dinner With Schmucks offers a sunnier view of humankind than its French antecedent (life lessons are learned), the director maintains that "the film is meant to have a dark edge. There are some crappy things that people are doing to each other in our story . . . so I wanted to have another layer, a more troubling layer, underneath everything that Steve was doing."

Asked to name some touchstone films and filmmakers in the comedy realm (a theater marquee in Dinner for Schmucks has Preston Sturges' screwball classic Sullivan's Travels on it), Roach was quick to answer: Woody Allen's Annie Hall ("I was such a Woody Allen freak in college"), Mike Nichols' The Graduate ("the cinematic language of that film is just so exquisite"), and Hal Ashby's Harold and Maude ("I love the weird construct of reality, because both Harold and Maude have kind of dueling delusions").

But he's also a big fan of full-on slapstick and physical comedy. This is the guy, after all, who deftly orchestrated the scene in Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery in which Mike Myers maneuvered naked around his hotel suite while Elizabeth Hurley held objects aloft to hide his "naughty bits" from the camera lens.

"I think physical comedy is often undervalued," he says. "But look at Blake Edwards' work with Peter Sellers, or Monty Python, or Buster Keaton . . . the physical comedy contributes to the story. . . . It's a very precise choreography that you can charm the audience with and pull them into the spell of the movie. It's not verbal, and so maybe it's a more childish, reptilian thing- I don't know what the right term would be.

"But if that happens while you're also keeping people connected to the characters of the story, why not?"