There are spoilers in this article.

“The Spanish film Campeones, on which Champions was based, was pretty progressive in that it was about a basketball team and they’re all Disabled,” notes film director Bobby Farrelly (Something About Mary, Dumb and Dumber To).

“There are ten main players on a basketball team and they went for it. They didn’t make it soft. They didn’t try to make everyone look like angels. They really they weren’t afraid to go for a joke and I admire that in the original movie,” penned by screenwriters David Marqués and Javier Fesser, continues the filmmaker.

Bobby set out to put his stamp on an English language version of the original movie with Champions. “I think the major difference from the original was that it had a bit of a broader comic tone where everything’s slightly exaggerated. When we made ours, I wanted to make sure that it was completely grounded in reality. You would totally believe that each character is a real person,” adds Farrelly.

Bobby Farrelly is no stranger to programs that help Disabled kids. “The Best Buddy program is a great program and it involves kids with disabilities. It was started by the Schreiber family who also started the Special Olympics, so the Friends basketball team in the movie coming from a really good place,” says Farrelly. Bobby’s son, who also worked on the film was involved in a high school program called Hoop Heroes where a group of Disabled students also formed their own basketball team.

Screenwriter Mark Rizzo (Gravity Falls, Green Eggs and Ham) extracted the funniest moments from Campanones and inserted them into Champions. Farrelly also added that Rizzo also improved on the love relationship between Marcus (Woody Harrelson) and Alex (Kaitlin Olson) which is central to the story.

Comedic Style

The style of comedy in Champions can best be described as having one foot on the ground and the other in mid-air. Some may argue it’s a departure from the outlandish gross out comic sensibility Farrelly is best known for. “We want to set up a world where you want to believe that it’s real, but there’s a certain broadness to it. Things can happen that are probably a little bit more exaggerated than in real life. That frees you up to do something zany like the larger-than-life zipper scene in There’s Something About Mary.” (You all remember the one)

“But in Champions, the comedy is more of a dramedy. It’s very much set in the real world and the comedy is just things that happen… real human things… not goofy things,” elaborates the filmmaker. Bobby Farrelly chose this grounded style of comedy because that is what the story required. This is in sharp contrast to The Ringer (2005), which Bobby co-produced with his brother Peter, about Steve Barker (Johnny Knoxville) joining the Special Olympics to erase his crippling debt which played out in an over the top tone. Farrelly didn’t want to retell that type of story.

Bobby Farrelly

Balancing the specific comedic shades in Champions was a taxing exercise in navigating restraint and creative freedom. Rizzo and Farrelly balanced the laugh out loud gross moments with the tear-jerking ones. “I feel like the comedy works better if you really love the people,” says Farrelly. If your audience cares about the characters, you can get away with a lot.

This is the signature formula that makes a Farrelly comedy funny. “People are expecting a laugh, but it plays itself seriously and it tricks the audience a little. It catches them off balance and and it makes them feel for that character.” Then it charges into the “I can’t believe they just did that” zinger. It’s a mixture of heart and side-splitting laughter. “Characters can get away with that because everyone laughs in the end.” Bobby Farrelly admits that Champions has more heart than comedy than he normally does.

Champions has one-third comedy and two-thirds heart

Mark Rizzo delivered his screenplay in good shape. Farrelly wore his director’s hat most of the time, rather than rewriting and polishing Rizzo’s draft. “We might tweak a little here and there, but we basically stuck to the original screenplay so I didn’t necessarily feel like he had to be there writing on the set,” notes Farrelly.

Marcus Loves Alex

While the basketball team shenanigans continue, initially incompatible Marcus and Alex fall in love. We asked Bobby Farrelly why they were both so terrible at relationships. Their mutual lack of being able to meaningfully connect with other people draws them together. “Alex’s story was that she was trying to be protective of her brother. It was coming from a good place. She loved her brother and she thought, ‘Oh, I’ll make sure that I protect him throughout my life.” By doing that, she was kind of holding him back. She was smothering him. It took a while and Marcus pointed it out to her. You think you’re being a hero, but you’re actually, maybe you need to let go. She was afraid to let him go. She had overdone something and she didn’t realize it,” explains Bobby.

“Woody’s character, Marcus, wanted to be a great basketball coach. In order to be a great basketball coach, you have to get to know your players outside the game so you can know how to coach them. It’s not just X’s and O’s on a chalkboard. And that’s what he had to learn with the Friends basketball team where he he got to know them all individually to became a better person,” states Farrelly.

Champions follows an ensemble cast. Alex, Marcus and the Friends team each need sufficient screen time and character arcs. They need individual stories, cross-character stories, and also a unifying story. Bobby Farrelly was mindful of not spending too much time on one character and having one defining scene for each. “I don’t like to have a movie that goes too long. I just like to leave the audience wanting more,” confesses Farrelly. “That’s better than leaving them wanting less,” he jokes.

Marlon (Casey Metcalfe), Benny (ames Day Keith), Marcus (Woody Harrelson), Cody (Marcus, Ashton Gunning) & Blair (Tom Sinclair). Photo courtesy of Focus Features

Much of the cutting down process occurred during editing. “It was a tricky screenplay for Mark the writer to tell everyone’s story and give everyone their due, but he pulled it off,” adds Bobby. Rizzo’s economic screenplay is remarkably dense.

Champions could have easily given itself over to traditional underdog story tropes – the worst team impossibly beating the top contenders. We’ve seen this  story in films like Dodgeball. Bobby Farrelly didn’t fully have that luxury. It was a matter of logistics. Many scenes depicting basketball games were written. “While when we were shooting, it was hard to control our Disabled actors because we were always playing against other teams. And I wasn’t really directing them. So it was hard to choreograph the exact basketball play that was called for in the scene.” Farrelly basically reverse-engineered these scenes based on the footage he had.

“You do not want to play into the tropes and clichés, and if you, the audience can get a little bit ahead of you. So that’s generally not a good thing. In most of these movies, something like winning a championship happens at the end, and the audience knows this is going to happen,” says the filmmaker. He wants to avoid predictability.

“As the writer you always want to try to figure out how do we get to an end that the audience doesn’t necessarily expect, but at the same time, you want to leave them satisfied. So sometimes, it’s not just ‘Who won the game? This was an emotional win which is more than just the numbers on the scoreboard,” notes Farrelly.

Sports movies have a limited number of possible endings. They win or they lose. Test screenings may influence the final ending. “I think you always have to fight against telling clichés or telling them over and over again,” continues Farrelly.

Farrelly saved the most heart-felt moment until the end of the movie where Marcus experiences his most character-defining moment. “Marcus, is disappointed by what happened at the end. He doesn’t get what was good about it. And then he sees the team’s joy, They’re happy for the other team too. It’s so authentic, it’s so human. His heart grew ten sizes that day. It’s truly a happy moment for everyone.“