"I Love You, Phillip Morris" is The Gayest Movie Ever Made by Straight Men

I Love You, Phillip Morris co-directors John Requa (left) and Glenn Ficcara (right)
attend the film's Paris premiere with stars Ewan McGregor and Jim Carrey

Given that I Love You, Philip Morris is one of the gayest high profile movies ever made, it would be easy to assume that gay men must somehow behind its journey to the big screen. After all, it took Gus Van Sant, Dustin Lance Black, Bruce Cohen and Dan Jinks to get Milk, another passion project, made after years of work.

But that isn’t the case with I Love You, Philip Morris. It is actually two straight men – Glenn Ficarra and John Requa – who fell in love with the story and then persevered long enough to not only get the movie made, but to finally find a U.S. distributor so American audiences could see a love story about a gay con man and the love of his life.

But for Ficcara and Requa, who shared writing and directing duties on ILYPM, the gay part of their movie is almost incidental – which isn’t to say they try to hide the movie’s gayness in any way. In fact, that couldn’t be further from the truth.

It’s just that these two men live in a world where they don’t see a distinction between gay or straight. For them, ILYPM is simply a love story they had to tell. And that American audiences need to see.

AfterElton caught up with Ficarra and Requa to discuss their progressive view of the world, the movie’s tortured journey to release, that gay sex scene, working with Jim Carrey and Ewan McGregor and much more!

AfterElton: What drew two straight guys to I Love You, Philip Morris, one of the gayest movies I've ever seen?
Glenn Ficcara: As we say: we're straight, but we keep trying. It's an amazing, incredible story and it's just incidental that the love story is between two guys. That was the whole upshot of the thing, is that we said "Let's make it really kind of matter-of-fact" and never really talked about the gay thing except for, you know, where he kind of comes out of the closet. Because I'm just sick of the ... the kind of "gay message" movie. It kind of treads the same ground all the time, so ... we live in a world where it's just incidental, and that was kind of a goal.

John Requa: I think the thing that drew us to it was the love story. I had just met my soon-to-be wife at that point, and I was pretty goofy in love and this material kind of came along that was just the most incredible love story.

AE: One of the things I really like about the movie is that Stephen is a really complicated character in that he's no saint. In fact, he's a criminal and he's kind of a bad guy, but not in the way that gay characters in movies have typically been bad or self-hating or suicidal or somehow villainous.
JR: We love this guy Stephen Russell because he is completely a victim of himself. It's like he can't help but be this conniving, sort of manipulative character, but yet he's kind of unaware of it and when caught red-handed, he falls to pieces as if nothing could be more horrible, as if he doesn't deserve everything he gets. There's something that's so human about him.

GF: His heart is always in the right place, and that was the real deal with that. He was always doing it for some grander reason, be it liberation or love or finding happiness. There's nothing to really fault him for – I mean, other than the criminal acts.

I think you're right, the history of gays in cinema went from, like, the swish to the gayness as an ugly part of their character, to make the villain more reprehensible. Morally reprehensible. In this, it was just about a guy doing things for love, and that's why the gay thing is incidental – he's just a guy in love, and everybody can identify with that.

AE: One of the things the movie's gotten a lot of buzz for is that very brief sex scene with Jim. Is that going to be in the U.S. release?
GF: Absolutely.

JR: Yes.

GF: We wouldn't have sold the movie if someone had asked us to cut that out. We've not made any cuts for content or anything. This is the same movie that we showed at Cannes.

AE: A lot of people thought that was something that wouldn't make it into the U.S. release.
GF: No, no, no, no, it's totally untouched and kept pure. But a lot of the ad campaigns in the worldwide release, depending on the country, some were trying to hide the gay thing. Others were playing it up as kind of flippant. I think Roadside [the film’s U.S. distributor] is the only one, with their trailer and their poster and everything, have really caught the spirit of the movie.

JR: The poster is one of my favorite posters for any movie ever. It sells the fact that it's a love story.

AE: When it came to the sex scene, when you told Jim about this part and the filming of it, I'm assuming ... no big deal?
GF: No, we never talked about it. We told him how we wanted to shoot it, because it's a very funny kind of reveal, but he never batted an eye about it, you know? He got it as a visual and we all agreed- it was an effective way of revealing that he was gay.