Justin Timberlake and Cameron Diaz Talk "Bad Teacher"

Former romantic-in-real-life duo Justin Timberlake and Cameron Diaz seem to be great pals now and it shows in their new comedy film Bad Teacher. Justin plays a clueless but rich substitute teacher at the middle school where Cameron’s character Elizabeth “teaches”… well, sort of, if “teaching” includes drinking, smoking, bad language, showing movies all day in class and generally being “hot” while in full gold-digger mode. (Warning: the film is rated “R” for just about everything… except violence).

Determined to find the ultimate sugar-daddy, Elizabeth is saving money for a boob job while eyeing Justin’s newbie teacher ‘round campus.  Justin’s comedy experience on “Saturday Night Live” serves him very well in the film and Cameron’s teacher is a gal who grows on you despite her shocking behavior. Let’s dish….

TeenHollywood: Justin and Cameron, you have a “love” scene with your clothes on. I’m sure that was awkward.

Cameron: It was absurd but I’m mostly proud of it. 

Justin: We felt we had a responsibility to the young people so that (scene) was really a public service announcement for safe sex.

Cameron: When you’ve got the denim on denim you can’t….

Justin: Nobody ever got pregnant with their jeans on. (laughter)

Cameron: That’s pretty much the only message that’s in the movie that we’re proud of. We thought we should offer up a “jean-jam”.

Justin: And it was “jammin’”! (laughter)

TeenHollywood: Agreed! Cameron, your character Elizabeth does and says some horrible things, but you still like her. Maybe that is just your sunny personality but did you have to work really hard on that?

Cameron: That was the great thing about this movie. There was not one ounce of energy spent trying to make anything about this character likeable. It was genius. It was what I loved about this. I went thirty pages into the script and thought, “There’s no way I’m playing this character! How could I ever redeem her?” And then, ten pages later, I was like, “I think I like her! This is amazing! I don’t have to apologize.” There’s no apologizing. It is such a breath of fresh air. You usually spend the last twenty minutes of the movie, apologizing for what the character did in the first hour and a half. People are just afraid of owning it. In life, we don’t just have an epiphany and change our life. It happens, but it’s not the norm.

TeenHollywood: She’ll do anything to pay for an operation to make her boobs bigger. Was that fun to play?

Cameron: Completely. Obviously, if I thought I could get somewhere by having bigger boobies, I would have done it by now. For her, it’s everything. It’s called hard economic times. You can’t find a millionaire, like you could three or four years ago, before the crash. It’s a lot of work for her now. It’s an investment. She’s working hard for those.

I’m not judging her, but if we really believed this was the right thing to do, we wouldn’t be making fun of it, right? It was really fun to make fun of her. We all know what it’s like to come up against people who have screwed-up priorities. She focuses on the wrong things. 

TeenHollywood: On a more serious note, what teachers did you have that stand out with you, whether good or bad?

Justin: I had a teacher in seventh grade who told me I should have more realistic goals than songwriting and entertaining because my school work was suffering. You can quote me directly to her. Suck it! (laughter) (But, seriously) We have to figure out a way to pay teachers more. That’s my opinion of it. They are surrogate parents, away from home. The teachers we actually learned more from taught us life lessons more than trigonometry. They have such a huge responsibility and are under-appreciated and underpaid.

Cameron: I had a teacher, Mr. Fujikowa, in sixth grade, who used to tell us about his 3-year-old son. He would say how wonderful it was to teach your son and pass on your knowledge to him. He talked about how his son was starting to walk and how gratifying it was to see him take the four steps up the stairs to the porch, to get to the front door.  As the boy got to the very top last step, he would pull on the string that he tied around his son’s leg, to bring him back down to the first step.

TeenHollywood: He had a string tied around his toddler’s leg?

Cameron: I laughed so hard. Everyone else was horrified, but I was like, “That’s awesome!” That really shaped me.

TeenHollywood: Was there any worry about having a sexy teacher as the main character, given the news about teachers having affairs with students recently?

Cameron: The one thing that (my character) Elizabeth Halsey doesn’t do is take on a seventh grader. I would not be down with that. That would be a different movie, clearly.

TeenHollywood: Justin, you get to sing in the film, but it is the most ridiculous song. Did you get to contribute to the lyrics at all?

Justin: “Simpatico,” the original composition from Scott Delacorte, is a special song. That was an idea that (director) Jake (Kasdan) came to me about. In the script, it was a loose idea about the teacher band, and Scott doing a singer-songwriter thing. I remember Jake coming to me and saying, “We have to create something that is going to be terrible.” It’s pretty obvious that I put my body on the line for comedy, so why not my voice?

Honestly, the lyrics were the screenwriters’, and I just tried to create the most terrible melody that I could. It had to be so bad that they could not market it in the trailer. It’s really just an extension of the character. It was a total collaboration between me, the writers and the director.

TeenHollywood: Cameron, you were in The Sweetest Thing a number of years ago, and There’s Something About Mary, and now Bridesmaids is doing really well. Why do you think it’s the time for women to behave badly and be funny in movies now?

Cameron: My commitment to it is pretty obvious. Women have always behaved badly, probably worse than men, but maybe men just don’t have the stomach for it. They don’t want to see it on film because they just can’t take it. Any of my guy friends, when I tell them what women really talk about, they can’t take it. At this moment, it’s time for women to come out and be themselves and be accepted. There are a lot of those films now, where audiences are willing to laugh at those things.

This movie would have been just as hilarious with a male lead as a female, which is great. It just goes to show that humor is for everyone. I think we can find a lot of similarities in what we laugh at. I think people are willing to take a chance, and studios are now willing to formulate new things. We’re tired of seeing the same things. After a while, it just doesn’t work anymore. This is a business. We want to make some money and make things that work.

Justin: As a male who enjoys hearing those dirty things that women say, I think funny women, like Carol Burnett and Madeline Kahn, have been around forever. There have always been genius female actors in comedy. I also think we live in an age where technology; the internet has afforded a generation more of a crass look at the world. Directors want to push the envelope, but in a way that can get laughs. That always fuels the engine.

TeenHollywood: How did the whole cast craft the funny chemistry in the film?

Justin: After the first rehearsal and the first orgy, it all just felt right together. (laughter)

Cameron: It’s like comedy marksmen. Everyone is precise. They pull back the arrow, take a breath to slow down the heartbeat, and then let go, and bull’s-eye! You have to do that, on a comedy like this. You are constantly shooting, and you never stop.

TeenHollywood: The car wash scene where Elizabeth really lures in some customers with her “Daisy Duke” shorts and hot moves, was hilarious. Was that fun or just “you’re kidding? They want me to do a wet t-shirt carwash scene?

Justin: (butting in and answering for her) I feel like I nailed that. (Cameron is laughing). I choreographed the carwash scene and that will be on the DVD (he’s so kidding). The shot of the cop car hitting another car was real. Some cop drove by, saw Cameron and Jake just shot that… (kidding again).

TeenHollywood: Justin, you’ve hosted “Saturday Night Live” four times now. You must love that show.  

Justin: When I’m in New York City, they can’t keep me out of 30 Rock (where the show is shot). I grew up with SNL. It is an institution. It is part of the humor and chemistry between me and my father. I come from a divorced family. I didn’t get to spend a lot of time with my father when I was young, and it was something that we share that is really special to me.

Growing up with that show, I remember staying up late, which was really bad parenting because I was too young to watch some of the jokes that were on it, but I turned out okay. I’m just such a huge fan of the show. To be honest, I owe getting the shot to be in Bad Teacher, with these genius comedians and comediennes, directly to SNL and Lorne Michaels, for letting me be there and rock out.