When John Requa and Glenn Ficarra met as film majors at Pratt Institute, they had a clear path—Requa was set on becoming a writer, and Ficarra on becoming a director. That went nowhere, says Requa. “But every time we worked together, people liked it. So we just followed the heat, which is always the thing I find with people who are successful in business.”
After Pratt, Ficarra and Requa moved to Los Angeles and got their start as writers of both family-friendly and irreverent comedies (Cats and Dogs, Bad Santa). The two soon became trailblazers of cross-genre films they call “mixed tone,” directing and producing their scripts for I Love You Phillip Morris and Focus, eventually bringing their style to award-winning television (This Is Us, Rabbit Hole). The duo has struck an unusually long-lasting creative partnership, prioritizing a balanced collaboration throughout all the different facets of the film industry.
The following Q&A has been edited and condensed.
On How They Started Making Films Together
How did you begin collaborating at Pratt? How did you learn that you have shared creative sensibilities?
Glenn Ficarra: We had a lot of shared classes because we were in the film program, but I think we really bonded more in Foundation. We were both struggling to draw and sculpt and do all those things, so we hung out together.
John Requa: We bonded by our fear and misery. [Laughs.] We complained a lot but we use what we learned in those classes every day when we’re directing.
GF: [Those lessons] kicked in eventually. We had really good relationships with all of our instructors.
JR: Paul Corrigan was a playwright. And he had done some screenwriting, and we dedicated our first movie, I Love You Phillip Morris, to him. He was a huge influence on us. He taught us a lot about the three-act structure and characterization.
He was teaching screenwriting, which was an interesting class, because we were all film nerds, but then there were also kids who were just looking to fill up their roster of classes. And so you had kids who have been drawing their whole life who thought, “Oh, this will be easy. I’ll take a screenwriting class.” In that case, we were the ones who knew what we were doing!
In the film program, we did long films that were very serious and about death. Neither of them went anywhere. At the same time, for class assignments, we would do these short video pieces that were funny. And people loved them. We were like, “Wow, short and funny! That’s the secret!”
So when we came to LA, and we just started, we sort of kept doing that. Glenn came into some money, and we started making more short films, and funny films. And those short films became kind of like our business card. So as a director, you can trace it right back to Pratt.
“You just never know where the hookup is going to be for success. There’s a lot of luck, and connections help you find luck.”
Glenn Ficarra
GF: Yeah, it’s funny, I forgot about that. When we were at Pratt and we were working together, we were very serious students doing those little joke things on the side. We’d have an assignment, and instead of just doing the assignment coldly, we would have fun with it, and that just turned into . . .
JR: A career!
GF: A discovery that we were good at it. At least good-ish. I think we took out some of our frustrations at Foundation. We were making fun of artists.
JR: In a very broadly comedic way, we were making fun of what it was like to be a film student at an art school. Because you had these very serious artists, and then you have the sort of film students that were not quite as highly regarded. So we had a lot of that angst and we made movies about it.
That’s always been the difference between Glenn and me, in our careers, and a lot of our friends. They always had lofty ambitions and refused to compromise, and we always compromised. We are always like, “People like this better than that other stuff? Okay, we’re doing that now.” We’ve always been that way, because we just want to work. [Laughs.] Always compromise.
GF: Well, collaborate.
JR: Yeah, that’s right. We’re collaborating with each other so we’re compromising all the time. When you have a partner, you compromise on where you’re going to get coffee in the morning. Every decision of your life is compromised, so when it comes to compromising on other things, you just learn to be flexible.
On Creating a Sustainable Partnership
You’ve looked up to duo filmmakers in the past, such as the Coen brothers, who you went on to work with on Bad Santa. Has their relationship and that of similar filmmaking duos served as models for your creative partnership?
GF: Absolutely. Our first movie that we wrote and got made was a talking-animal movie, Cats and Dogs. Not art, you know? For a second, you feel like, “Oh, I’m gonna sell out doing this stuff.” But we had really admired Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, who were a few years older than us. They had done Ed Wood, The People vs. Larry Flynt, and Man on the Moon. They were awesome screenwriters, but their first movie was Problem Child, which was a terrible little movie about a mischievous little kid—basically the same thing we were doing. So we said, “If they can do Problem Child, and parlay that into Ed Wood, we must be able to do the same thing.”
So we had done Cats and Dogs, but then within a year we were already doing Bad Santa [with the Coen brothers] . . . for a lot less money. But we ran at that for the opportunity—we love those guys. And later we were supposed to direct a movie they wrote for us that we hired them to write. It’s all sort of connected.
Phil Lord and Chris Miller are friends of ours. They were younger than us, and they were kind of doing that with us when they first started directing live-action stuff. They did the Jump Streets movies, they did Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs. They were actually nominated for an Oscar last year for Spider Man: Across the Spider-Verse. They’re awesome, and much more successful than we are. We worked with them a lot when we were at Warner Bros.; we were all in animation together.
So yeah, teams are always a thing. But I don’t think many have lasted as long as we have, with the exception of Scott and Larry.
How have your different roles while filmmaking contributed to this long-lasting, successful relationship? I know you’ve said, “We have more success when we work together than when we don’t work together.”
GF: I think we complement each other’s blind spots.
JR: Again, we compromised on everything. We would be off doing our own thing, then we would get together and make short films. I was going to be a writer, so I was pursuing a writing career while Glenn was pursuing a directing career. And they went nowhere.
But every time we worked together, people liked it. So we just followed the heat, which is always the thing I find with people who are successful in business. They follow the heat and don’t get caught up in . . . you know, I used to have a friend who I went to Pratt with, actually, who used to say, “I will never do sitcom work.”
GF: Like, why? I’ve never understood that. How about you get a job and get some experience. The world is waiting for you!
JR: You have to get experience and get out there. This isn’t a short story; this is a novel. This is the first chapter.
GF: Certainly early on, we had more delineation about stuff we liked to do, but as we got older, our egos got smaller and testosterone went down; we just kind of overlapped.
We’ve worked together for so long, we know what the other is thinking anyway, usually. We follow the passion. Whoever feels more strongly about something, we trust each other enough not to block them. It’s kind of like one hive mind.
JR: Two half-wits make a whole.
Creative work holds its fair share of challenges. How do you bolster each other through difficult times?
GF: We have a rule we established fairly early on: only one of us is allowed to freak out at a time. No matter how you feel, you can’t agree—you have to offset it. Very early in our career, we would work each other up and we would go into shame- or work-death spirals.
That rule has served us very well. And we still use it to this day. It’s less histrionic than it used to be. Now it’s usually just, “I’m dying today. You gotta step in and talk to this actor. I hate them right now.” [Laughs.]
For emotional support, I think it’s really good to have a partner that you trust that you can go through these things with. I know a lot of directors and a lot of writers and they’re always very envious that we can lean on each other, because when you’re alone in a creative situation that’s blowing up, you tend to get a little paranoid. You’re tired and you feel like people aren’t giving you the whole story. When you have someone to bounce stuff off of, it’s incredibly valuable.
You’ve mentioned that your work on the film I Love You Phillip Morris (2009) has a special place in your hearts as the first film you wrote and directed together. How did you navigate this creative experience as a team?
JR: Well, sometimes you have the remarkably bad judgment of writing, directing, and producing a project. It seems like the dream, but boy, doing it is hard.
If you’re directing and you get a call in the middle of the night, at three o’clock in the morning, from an actor who’s freaking out and he or she wants to rewrite, you have to go to their hotel room, bang out the new pages for the next day, and then get up two hours later. It’s grueling.
GF: We probably would not have agreed to the schedule or the budget or anything were we making that movie today. But we didn’t know any better and we didn’t care. We wanted to make the movie.
JR: Jim Carrey had shown this great faith in us, to let two lunatics direct the movie for him. We just wanted to repay his faith and get our shot at directing, and we got it. So we owe him a lot.
Jim was actually very religious about our script. He didn’t want any changes. It was pretty impressive. But ever since then, every actor has wanted to make a change. [Laughs.]
GF: It was an incredibly hard experience, just because it was a lot at once. It was a lot of juggling, a lot of locations, a lot of people working on it. But it was like the best school you could ever have. There’s not much that’s happened since then that didn’t happen on that movie.
I don’t forget any bit of it. It’s all in my mind. I could tell you every name of every crew member on that movie.
JR: And it was fun too. I have very fond memories.
On Developing a Style
You’ve explored a career of seemingly contradictory styles, sometimes in the same projects. You were once known as writers of both family movies and crude comedies, and have directed films based on true stories, like Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, and others that are epic fantasies, like Jungle Cruise. How have you carved out such a diverse output throughout your career?
JR: We get bored easily. I always wonder if we had stuck to one style, maybe a crude comedy or a family movie, and said, “We’re just going to try to perfect this style,” like many of the great directors have done, if maybe we’d be in a different place. I don’t know what the answer is.
But we just get bored. We’re like, “Well, we did a war movie, let’s go do something else. We wanted to do Jungle Cruise, because we’re like, “We haven’t written a big-budget movie in forever. That sounds like a lot of fun!” We consider ourselves so lucky, because they keep giving us any train set we want to play with. And we can almost always get it made! So we just want to try and do different things.
Now we’re getting to the point where we have a checklist. “What are the different genres of movies or TV shows that we love that we can tick off before they kick us out of show business?”
GF: Some of them you do and you think, “Eh, whatever, I’m not going to do that again.” But some of them you find out you’re good at. We really want to do a horror movie. So we’ve written a few—maybe one day, I don’t know.
We’re fans of the movies, so we just want to try a bunch of stuff. Maybe in the way, way back, we were into the idea of fashioning a brand, but it’s really constricting. It never felt good to be told, “This is the thing you do.” I certainly didn’t want to be stuck in the crude-comedy business.
The good thing about TV for the last few years, until the powers that be decided to mess the whole business up, was that they were making lots of stuff. It was easier than getting big-budget-movie money to make genre pieces that wouldn’t normally go to us.
JR: And there’s this admirable thing about the film business that I genuinely love. Even now, as a grizzled old vet, when I go to set at four o’clock in the morning—we’re going to do it tomorrow—and I drive by all those trucks and I walk by all those different people—props guys and costumes and all of the makeup—I get a thrill. I love this collection of artists and artisans that gets together—all these unbelievable professionals. They build sets and costumes and balance tally sheets, all this crazy stuff—writers and actors and a thousand different disciplines, all of them perfected. It’s not that show business is a circus; it’s that show business is a different circus every day when you’re making a TV show or a movie, and it’s just the greatest thing in the world.
Our career is an extension of that. These people move from project to project, they pay no boundaries to genre or style. They just do their job. And that’s kind of how we are; we’re just one of those artisans.
“For emotional support, I think it’s really good to have a partner that you trust that you can go through these things with.”
Glenn Ficarra
Despite not making a brand, you’ve gone on to refine a style of crime films, a genre which is usually characterized by its coldness, that are funny and full of heart. How did you both arrive at this sensibility in the work you’ve co-written and directed?
JR: We like mixed tones. Our style is “the full meal deal.”
As young men, we saw Muriel’s Wedding, which I think is PJ Hogan’s masterpiece. It’s an Australian movie where you’re crying one minute and you’re laughing the next. We were in our 20s, and I remember we just said, “Well, why don’t we just do this? This is great. This seems like an exciting new area that film is going into.” There was nothing like it.
GF: Back in the day, when we started out in scripts, if you went off the tone, it would be red flags from everybody. We never stopped doing it and never stopped getting in trouble for doing it. One of the reasons why I think I Love You Phillip Morris was important is that we illustrated that you could do it.
Jim Carrey was incredibly instrumental in that too. He’s friends with Nicolas Cage, and he was obsessed with Leaving Las Vegas at the time, especially Cage’s performance. It could do everything. He could be wildly out there and incredibly tragic. [Jim Carrey] wanted to push it even farther than we even did. So we worked together to see how far we could go. He taught us how we could do different sizes and tones of things.
JR: Then when we met Dan Fogelman, who wrote Crazy, Stupid, Love, he was doing the same thing! We’re like, well, here’s some of a like mind. He doesn’t do crime movies; Fogelman was in the romantic comedies and family dramas, but with the same sort of mixed tone, laughing and crying. And so we hit it off. We saw our sensibilities match, and we made Crazy, Stupid, Love together, and we did This Is Us together, and we’re doing a new show with him now.
There was sort of an emerging mixed-tone style when we came to town back in the ’90s, and now it’s almost common. People are used to having tears in their laughter.
GF: Now it’s called dramedy. Then, there was no such thing.
On this topic, you’ve said in interviews that you are drawn to these misdirection narratives because “you don’t know what’s real and what’s fake. And that’s what movies are.” What’s informed this running motif throughout your work?
GF: We’re obsessed with liars, for some reason. I don’t know where that came from. We didn’t realize it until recently. It’s like, oh, everything we do is about people who lie or are deluded.
JR: Or trying to warp reality to their worldview. We love that.
GF: It’s a really common character and I don’t know where exactly it comes from other than we lie and trick people for a living.
JR: I think that’s what you do when you’re a filmmaker, right? You lie and deceive your audience. Jean-Luc Godard has this quote that says, “Film is truth—is reality—at 24 frames per second.” I don’t know what he’s talking about! It’s all about deception. It’s all about lies. That’s what we do. Audiences love to be fooled and misled. To me, that’s good screenwriting and good storytelling.
GF: Misdirection we were obsessed with when we were at Pratt. The first screenplay we ever wrote was heavy in misdirection and playing with genres. We definitely knew the genre language. Someone who was more successful doing it back then was Ben Stiller—he was really leaning into style, as opposed to straight parody, like Airplane.
JR: To wrap this back around to Pratt, there was never a sense of conformity. You’re at an art school, and it was about developing a unique voice and there’s no push towards the same. That’s great and that’s liberating, and I think that’s different.
In other film schools, there is more sense of an established canon and canonical styles that you have to conform to before you can break them. Whereas with Pratt it was like, well no, you can break them right out the gate! [Laughs.] Just shatter them; it doesn’t matter.
That’s the art school sensibility that I think we came from. We didn’t come in with a rulebook and say, “These are the rules,” and then gradually feel like we’ve earned the right to break them. We were like, “No, we can break the rules.”
GF: And feeling like you could make a comedy that didn’t look like a comedy—it could look like a dramatic film. That was something we wrestled with as students. We remembered thinking that that’s a really weird expectation of a comedy—that it has to look good. That’s changed a lot since then too.
On Working in Television
Did you have any takeaways from serving as showrunners in television?
GF: It’s not that I wouldn’t do it again, but it’s just a lot of work.
JR: It’s more than a lot of work. Every project in the film business, TV, or movies is a lot of work. What it is is that you have a lot of work and no time to do it.
Working long days, that’s fine. That’s no problem. That’s normal. That’s everybody. Everybody does that in the film business. From the PAs up to the producers, we all work really hard.
But when you don’t have the time to do your job, and you’re writing and directing and producing, it’s really tough.
GF: And some people do that and star! I have no idea how.
Sometimes you’re building the train tracks in front of the train and that’s nowhere anyone wants to be.
JR: And that’s TV. Because in TV, you’re writing and you’re creating as you’re going. Whereas if it was in movies, it’s different because you have a script.
I don’t know what it is about us. We push the budget. We really want to get as much out of every penny. And a lot of people are just like, “Let’s make it easy and have a lot of people talking to each other and no action.” But we’re like, “No, let’s make it look like a movie!” and drive everybody crazy for six months. [Laughs.]
What show are you working on now?
GF: It doesn’t have a title yet, and it’s for Hulu.
JR: It has Sterling K. Brown, who we’re excited to be working with again, and Dan Fogelman. This is our third project with Dan and our third project with Sterling.
We’re just directing and producing—which is thrilling. It’s a really interesting story about a secret service guy who’s covering something up for a retired president. The plot gets very convoluted in a dangerous way. It’s kind of hard to pitch because you don’t want to give it away. It’s full of surprises, and some that will really shock people.
On Wisdom from Pratt
What was a piece of advice you received at Pratt that’s stayed with you?
JR: It was from Camilo Rojas, our video-editing teacher. We were editing a project and we showed it to him. He goes, “Oh, that’s really great. Cut it in half. Cut it in length and still let the story and the characters make sense.” We were like, “Okay. That’s a nice challenge. We’ll take it.”
Then we showed it to him again. And he said, “Cut it in half again, and still make the characters and the story make sense,” and we were like, “What? Impossible!”
And I think he even asked us to do it a third time.
You learn how to edit a movie when you have to go through that process. It was horrible and arduous but we learned how little you need. What’s absolutely necessary.
GF: It keeps you from being self-indulgent. That was a really good lesson.
“[Pratt] was about developing a unique voice and there’s no push towards the same. That’s great and that’s liberating, and I think that’s different.”
John Requa
While learning your craft at Pratt, you were also forming connections. What piece of advice would you give to current students around finding their people?
GF: You just never know where the hookup is going to be for success. There’s a lot of luck, and connections help you find luck.
We were friendly with a lot of people from the class above us and worked on their films. They were our landing pad when we got out here. My first job was because of the guy whose student film I edited, which won a student Emmy. He got offered a job that he didn’t want. And I took the job. I actually offered it to John first, but John didn’t take it; I took it. That led to me becoming an editor and having a good amount of money. And we used a lot of the contacts I made from that and those John made from his PA’ing job to get a crew to make our shorts.
Everything begets everything. I met my wife by total happenstance, all connected with that chain of events.
JR: I think the social aspect of going to school is something that people never talk about. There’s a personal aspect to it beyond just your professional life. It’s important to be social and work with people on projects and collaborate. If you think somebody doesn’t have your sensibility, that should be a reason you want to work with them, not a reason you don’t want to work with them. Try to understand where they’re coming from, and try to broaden your perspective.
People like to talk about the validity of higher education, and they have some points if you look straight at the numbers. But those relationships you develop are the relationships of your life.