MANILA, Philippines - Columbia Pictures presents Cameron Diaz and Justin Timberlake in Bad Teacher, a rare, raunchy comedy headlined by a woman.
Director Jake Kasdan says, “It’s very unusual to find an edgy, R-rated comedy centered around a woman,” he says. “The R rating gives you enormous freedom to be as completely insane as you want to be in any moment and we were with a group of people who embraced that completely.”
In the film, Elizabeth Halsey (Diaz) is a teacher who just doesn’t give an F. She’s foul-mouthed, ruthless and wildly inappropriate. She drinks, she gets high and she can’t wait to marry her meal ticket and walk away from her day job teaching middle school. When she’s dumped by her fiancé, she sets her plan in motion to win over a rich, handsome substitute (Timberlake) competing for his affections with an overly energetic colleague, Amy (Lucy Punch) but finds herself fighting off the advances of an irreverent gym teacher (Jason Segel). Elizabeth’s outrageous schemes and their wild consequences will shock her students, her co-workers and even herself.
When the idea for Bad Teacher came to the screenwriting team of Gene Stupnitsky and Lee Eisenberg, they knew they’d hit on something incredibly rare and special. “It seemed like there weren’t a lot of comedy roles for women,” says Lee. “We would see so many funny women in Saturday Night Live and in talk shows, and they’d be hysterical and charming, and then we’d go to the movies and they’d be props to get two guys to become friends or whatever. We really wanted to write a project for a comedienne.”
“I thought it was one of the funniest scripts I had ever read,” says Kasdan. “Lee and Gene have a completely original, hilarious voice I think that they’ve written one of the great female comedy parts, and we found the perfect person to play her in Cameron Diaz.”
Kasdan says it is Cameron’s willingness to completely give herself over to the role that sets her apart. “Cameron has got this great thing: She is completely fearless,” says Kasdan. “She enjoys being dirty and edgy and she’s completely open-minded about what might work. She was the perfect person to be at the center of this and it was a real gift for the writers and me to be working with her.”
Opening in August in theaters, Bad Teacher is distributed by Columbia Pictures, local office of Sony Pictures Releasing International.