Patrick Stoner: I have a bone to pick with you.
Jim Carrey: Cool.
Stoner: I watched what was going on up there on the screen, and I laughed, and then I stopped myself and said, "Stop that, don't laugh at that." Then, I would watch and laugh, and go, "No, stop that, this is sad, quit laughing." I was very confused.
Carrey: [laughs] Great. Perfect. Got you.
Stoner: That's a very delicate line, isn't it? The one between humor and pathos?
Carrey: Yeh, it is. You try to get to the edge. Occasionally, you step on it. You go "eech." You hit a button that pushes somebody over the line into lunacy.
Stoner: I wouldn't normally expect that you would have developed a back story on Ace Ventura, but I'm going to take a chance and guess that you thought about where THIS guy came from and how he got to be what he is.
Carrey: I sure did. He's basically a product of the "no love" syndrome. The only love in his life came from Carol Brady. He was sat in front of the TV and the tube babysat him. To him, the perfect family is MY THREE SONS and Matthew Broderick is Robbie Douglas.
Stoner: You know what depressed me? I was thinking, "You know, there's a little bit of me in him."
Carrey: There's a little bit of him in ALL of us. TV is one of those legal addictions, like coffee, that has been sold to us and separated us from each other, insidiously. That's why the standards on television are reflecting the standards of 10 years ago--always--because we long for what we miss.
Stoner: When I first met you around the time of ACE VENTURA, you told me that you had spent a couple of years studying straight dramatic acting at Julliard. Was that experience valuable for THE CABLE GUY?
Carrey: Absolutely. I went around and took a couple of classes here, and some over there, and put them all together in a sort of hodgepodge of what worked for me. I expected that most of my career would be in dramatic acting. My hero was James Dean. I'm not comparing myself to him, but he also was conscious of his physicality. I mean, he had the insides of the characters down--with all of that Method acting working--but he also knew how to POSE. He would fill the frame with an image that he wanted to project. He would lean back and arch his neck to get just the angle he wanted, with his leg up and out filling the rest of the frame. He knew JUST what the audience was going to see in addition to what was going on inside of himself.