How Jim Carrey’s personality shaped the movie Ace Ventura

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Did you know there's a very wild and interesting thing about the Ace Ventura back story? It's not the Rick Moranis close call. It's how much of the film's gestation came from Jim Carrey being sleep deprived and professionally burnt out. Midnight script sessions following 15 hour days spent making In Living Color. Jokes crafted from the annoyance of coworkers being repurposed as a film. That's not a process, that's a well controlled potentially chaotic thing which is bordering on art.

The bird movement detail if true, says a lot about the film. Ace Ventura character never really looks at anything, he surveys. He's a nervous, hyper vigilant, slightly predatory guy in all his glory.

Any less dedicated an actor than Jim Carrey would have played the part as a series of slapsticks as the term it in the comedy industry. Jim Carrey plays the part as a man who is completely crazy because of his own arguably silly ideas.

The catchphrases being deliberately crafted is the key detail that puts the entire film in a different light. "Alrighty then" doesn't necessarily sound well crafted. If you had a script with that given to you, 9 out of 10 you wouldn't know how to make it sound as funny as Jim Carrey would. It looks like something that leaked out of a person's personality.

That to me is the art hiding in plain sight within the absurdity. Jim Carrey and Shadyac wanted cultural saturation and got it by making the artifice invisible.

The darker early versions of the script being true says a great deal about the film's creation as well. Accidental decapitations, a deadbeat dad back story, someone in the room wanted Ace to be a player. They should have left those elements in, but the instincts that led to cutting them weren't wrong. Some of the funniest performances come from a place of pain. Whether that pain translates to the film as a whole is another question for another blog for another day.

People will still have something negative to say about it though.