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The idea for Kicking & Screaming began with a conversation between producer/manager Jimmy Miller and his client and friend Will Ferrell, about Ferrell acting in a film with kids.
We thought anything he’d do with kids had great comic potential.” Miller continues, “Will and I wanted to find something where he’d be both loveable and kind and ultimately winning with the kids, but then somewhere in there, be able to lose his stuff and get sort of, well...crazy.” Ferrell and Miller started thinking about the world of youth soccer, both immediately sparking to the popular sport as fairly untapped movie material. Recalls Ferrell, “We were marveling at the fact that on any given Saturday, in every park, there’s a kids’ soccer game going on. It amazed us that there hadn’t been much cinematic attention paid to this national phenomenon.” The actor, who’s played soccer all his life, also liked the idea of how the parents of these kids get so fanatically involved. “It just seemed like fertile ground for a good comedy,” says Ferrell. Miller heartily agreed. “I know this world because it’s my life on the weekends. My son Sam plays AYSO [American Youth Soccer Organization] soccer and I’ve seen firsthand how seemingly civil and upstanding dads turn into animals—storming the field, getting in the ref’s face, following their sons or daughters down the sidelines. To say the least, it can get pretty out of hand.” Director Jesse Dylan has also witnessed this kind of behavior. He adds, “I’ve watched my brother’s kids play T-ball and the parents there are at heightened states of emotion at every game. It’s like they’re the ones playing, not their children.” Convinced this was the way to go, Miller brought in the screenwriting team of Steve Rudnick and Leo Benvenuti (The Santa Clause, Space Jam) to pen the soccer comedy. The writers worked out the basic story with Miller and Ferrell: nice guy (Ferrell) at odds with his overly competitive father (say, a Robert Duvall type) with both coaching opposing soccer teams, and then nice guy recruits his dad’s arch rival, a winning Super Bowl coach (say, someone like Mike Ditka), to be his assistant coach. “Not that we had Robert Duvall or Mike Ditka,” admits Miller, “but we used them as prototypes. And it was such a simple, high concept to understand, you’re already laughing.” Rudnick and Benvenuti borrowed from their own lives to flesh out the story, starting by setting it in their native Chicago. “We were also both coaches on our respective son’s athletic teams,” explains Rudnick. “And, although we never saw a coach become quite as maniacal as Phil Weston does in the script, we weren’t too far off.” The two young Italian soccer champs Ferrell’s character Phil recruits to help his ailing team were concocted from Benvenuti’s past. “When I was growing up in Oak Park, Illinois, there were two Greek boys who came to America to apprentice at their uncle’s butcher shop and learn English. They excelled in hockey like you wouldn’t believe and took their high school team from obscurity to almost state championship,” relates Benvenuti. “We took that idea, made the kids Italian—because it’s my heritage— and switched hockey to soccer, because that’s the film we were writing.” The writers then wove three separate themes into the story: the sport of kids’ soccer, the lunacy of aggressive soccer dads and the complexity of father/son relationships. Now for the first hurdle—convincing Duvall and Ditka to sign on. “Though we always had them in mind,” reveals Miller, “we never actually thought we’d get them.” But, to the surprise and thrill of everyone, Duvall, one of the industry’s most respected actors, signed on immediately after reading the script. “The story was very funny and I liked my character,” says Duvall. “I’m also a big soccer fan, plus I really admire Will Ferrell’s type of comic acting. It’s not just rooted in shtick, it’s rooted in reality,” maintains the Academy Award® winner and six-time nominee.
With Duvall onboard, next came the task of landing famed Chicago Bears coach Mike Ditka. As it turned out, like Duvall, the Super Bowl champ was eager to join their team. Jokes Ditka, “The filmmakers were looking for someone to play me, and they figured they couldn’t find anybody to play me, so they got me to play me. Seriously though, I really thought the script was fun, and while the time commitment of doing a feature film was a little overwhelming, I knew I couldn’t pass it up.” Ditka can also completely relate to Ferrell’s Phil Weston. “He starts out as a guy who wants to teach the kids how to play and make them students of the game. And all of a sudden, after he’s in it for a while, he just wants to win. He goes from being a very timid guy to this really boisterous coach. Kind of like somebody else I used to know,” Ditka adds with a grin. Additional cast members were then hired, including Kate Walsh as Phil’s supportive wife Barbara; Dylan McLaughlin as Phil’s cute, athletically challenged son Sam; Josh Hutcherson as Buck’s confident, overachieving son Bucky; and Musetta Vander as Buck’s sexy younger wife Janice. Finally came the massive job of assembling the league’s twelve soccer teams, as well as finding the two perfect Italian soccer players. The filmmakers enlisted the expertise of Dan Metcalfe, winner of Nike’s 2004 Boys Coach of the Year, to spearhead the effort. In addition to screening the potential team members for playing ability, Metcalfe coached the “teams” before and during principal photography and choreographed all of the soccer plays that appear on-screen. Metcalfe, with assistant coach Ian Feuer and the film’s soccer stunt coordinator, Kathy Jarvis, held a national search for the 10- to 12-year-old Americans, while a casting director traveled to Rome to scout and tape young Italian players for the filmmakers’ consideration. Metcalfe had varied requirements for the different teams. “For the Tigers, Phil’s losing team of misfits, we were looking for actors who weren’t the best soccer players, but who were good enough that they could look bad,” he explains. “These actors had to be able to play at a higher level than they were actually required to play in the script.” The boys also had to have distinctive looks and personalities. To that end, the Tigers’ starting lineup ultimately included: Erik Walker as Ambrose, the indifferent, distracted big kid; Elliot Cho as the diminutive Byong Sun, the adopted son of a lesbian couple; Steven Anthony Lawrence as Mark, the smart-aleck jokester; Jeremy Bergman as Hunter, a hyper kid with a sugar jones; Sammy Fine as Jack, who loves his soccer uniform (and never takes it off); and Dallas McKinney as Connor, the goalie with terrible eyesight. For the rival team, Buck Weston’s first-place Gladiators, Metcalfe asserts, “We cast some of the most talented players I’ve coached over the last few years, keeping height and size in mind.” As for casting the other teams, open auditions were held all over the country, where players had to prove their technical skill. “They had to dribble, juggle and receive, and pass a ball under certain pressures that we set up,” details Metcalfe. “The boys had to concentrate and perform on command so when the movie was being shot, there’d be no waiting around for them.” He concludes, “It was a tough process, but we’re very proud of the kids we cast.” More Production NotesReturn to "Kicking and Sreaming" Index
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“Will had done a sketch on Saturday Night Live where he ended up berating this little boy—and it was very funny,” says Miller, “especially because of the visual of Will being so much physically bigger. 
In addition, this is the first time the prolific actor had ever appeared in a broad comedy. “I’d done M*A*S*H a long time ago,” he considers, “but this was a different kind of comedy. I just thought it would be fun.” 