BIBLICAL PROPORTIONS 'EVAN ALMIGHTY,' HAS A BIG BUDGET, BIG ANIMALS AND A REALLY BIG BOAT.

Byline: Bob Strauss

Film Writer

Though it's widely reported to be the costliest film comedy in history, "Evan Almighty" looks like a pretty good bet.

The first film in the series, 2003's "Bruce Almighty," was a megahit. "Bruce" star Jim Carrey was hesitant to continue with the franchise, though. That might have been bad, except for the fact that Carrey's career has taken a nosedive over the past several years.

And that Steve Carell, who stole a few scenes as preening news anchor Evan Baxter in the first "Bruce" and quickly, happily agreed to fill the sequel's lead void, now has such hits as TV's "The Office" and movies "The 40-Year-Old Virgin" and "Little Miss Sunshine" under his belt.

Animal attraction

Plus, with a Noah's Ark theme, it's got all kinds of potential animal antics that should attract the kiddie crowd (it's rated PG, family-friendlied down from "Bruce's" PG-13). And that Book of Genesis-inspired plotline should appeal to the elusive but lucrative religious crowd that Hollywood's been courting ever since "The Passion of the Christ" made all of that money.

But the heavy-breathing media attention paid to "Evan's" $175 million production budget has definitely affected some of the folks involved with the movie.

Pros ... and cons

"I feel a little genre discrimination," says Tom Shadyac, the director of both of Universal Studios' "Almighty" movies. "In a way, I'm honored that they trusted us with this kind of money.

"But I haven't heard anything said about the $300 million budgets of dramas this summer. We're at $170 million-plus, I don't know what the exact figure is. But it's like comedy, again, hasn't earned the respect."

Actually, the $300 million or so estimated costs of this year's "Spider-Man" and "Pirates of the Caribbean" installments have garnered their fair share of attention. The concern with "Evan" is because comedies tend to earn less money than action franchise movies, especially in lucrative overseas markets.

"It is what it is," Shadyac acknowledges. "I think it's the most expensive comedy of all time. I don't know, I don't have the budget charts of other movies, and you have to define what a comedy is. But it adds a certain pressure. You want to make good to your investors.

"And you've got a relatively new star. Steve doesn't have the name recognition yet that Jim Carrey has, and Jennifer Aniston was in 'Bruce.' So we had to be that much more on our game, and hopefully craft a movie that really had a wide audience and had broad entertainment value."

For Carell, that meant trying to ignore budget considerations and focusing on the things that he had some measure of control over.

"I can't say that I personally feel a lot of pressure because I've already done my job," the level-headed comedy star says.

"The pressure for me was to try and do as well as I could with the character, try to make him funny and infuse it with whatever I could as an actor. But beyond that, it is totally out of my hands."

That sounds like standard actor talk, but Carell no doubt means what he says. It can't be easy to work with a menagerie of irrational co-stars. In the film, Morgan Freeman's God comes to freshman congressman Evan. Understandably reluctant to start building a large boat, Evan is plagued by pairs of animals until he gives in.

Four-legged follies

This meant many scenes with fauna that, however well-trained, still behaved like beasts.

"I liked some better than others, I must say," Carell admits. "In terms of this movie, the birds were not particularly my favorites.

"It's hard to bond with an animal that is, essentially, pooping on you. But the elephants and the giraffes and the alpacas, they were fun. And to be that close to an animal is a very different experience from seeing them at the zoo or on television.

"You can see what they're thinking, in a way."

Shadyac, whose directing debut was Carrey's star-making "Ace Ventura: Pet Detective," agrees that there's nothing like working with real, live animals.

"They give you such spontaneity," the director enthuses. "And as long as you're patient, and your crew is patient, and the studio's patient with you, you wait long enough and that yak is going to give you an expression that you can't duplicate."

Roll over, Fido -- fast

Waiting for animals to act, though, costs money. As does filming some 75 pairs of different mammals and 30 different bird species -- often separately, since some were natural predators of others.

Then there was the cost of digitally compositing them together in shots, along with all of the other creatures that had to be computer generated from scratch. Like the flood. It's a Noah story, so there's a big flood.

Building several stages of an ark under construction -- to biblical specifications -- wasn't cheap, either. And when Carell hurt his foot one day, media started speculating that things were out of control.

"We didn't miss even a day as a result of that," producer Michael Bostick says. "It was just a twisted ankle as he hopped out of the car.

"That's when we knew that he was all of a sudden a movie star, because it was reported on the CNN crawl that night."

CAPTION(S):

2 photos

Photo:

(1 -- cover -- color) Will it FLOAT?

The pricey 'Evan Almighty' hopes to rain dollars

(2) Evan Baxter (Steve Carell), a junior congressman, becomes a Noah-like figure tapped by God to build an ark before the great flood in "Evan Almighty."