Will Speck and Josh Gordon (Furlined) are known for their great performance direction and slightly oddball comedy. So taking to the ice with Will Ferrell and Jon Heder in what they call a "sports comedy about men's figure skating" wasn't a big stretch for the pair's first feature, Blades of Glory. While doing wardrobe fittings for their sitcom pilot revolving around Geico's Cavemen characters, the pair took a few moments to tell tales about men in tights.

This being your first feature, what were you searching for when looking at scripts?

Will: We were looking for something that we responded to at its core, and I think there's something about being able to turn men's figure skating on its ear and being satirical about that world that was really exciting. And the ability to meld choreography with comedy was really exciting to us because it was a logical extension of where we were going already with our commercial work.

Josh: Also, we're huge Will Ferrell fans.

Did you have a concerted plan when moving into features?

Will: We always wanted to do features. We went to NYU together and this was always part of the plan, and commercials were an amazing way to start in the business, but we knew that we would start making features eventually. At the end of the day, you have to look for a project that you're willing to spend a year and a half of your life doing. It really consumes you; you have to know that you're going into battle and you're going to have to spend a huge chunk of your life doing this, so you have to like.

Compared to your experience in commercials, what was the most surprising element of this job?

Will: Being a commercial director really prepares you for the physical element enormously well. Most directors doing their first feature have the least amount of experience on the set. When you come out of commercials you're battle-tested.

Josh: The hard thing is, when you're a commercial director, you're shielded because you always have the agency there to fight battles with the clients - especially when it comes to money. In the film business you're on the front line, and that gave us a huge amount of respect for all the producers we've worked with. It's really hard going in to ask people for more money.

What do you find the differences between the two disciplines to be?

Will: Obviously with commercials you have such an unbelievable amount of control and so much is put into polishing such a short amount of time. What you have to learn in features is when to fight your battles and when to give over, because you can't possibly control every element to the same level that you're used to. You just have to figure out what's important to the movie. In a way it's liberating because you go more with the flow.

Josh: The worst thing that can happen to you when you're directing a feature is that you get tired of what you're doing because there are so many decisions every day and any one of them can be important. If you get overwhelmed or worn down by the process, the whole thing suffers. You really have to have this stamina and realize that you're in it for the long haul.

What was this experience like? Did it meet your expectations?

Josh: Honestly, I think it exceeded our expectations. I don't think we could have hoped for a better first situation. To have Will Farrell as your lead, who's such an amazingly talented guy at the height of his game, and then to have Ben Stiller as your producer, and then to have Dreamworks, which is an incredibly supportive studio, we actually came out of it with very few complaints, which we've heard is very rare.

In your words, how do you describe this movie?

Josh: It's an epic, ridiculous comedy about eh world of ice skating. It's a sports film and comedy, kind of married. That was really the difficult thing. Will and I, when we took the project, we realized that we didn't want to make just a comedy, we wanted to make a comedy that moved you like a sports film so that you would actually care about these guys and root for them. Whenever you do that you become a slave to two masters in two genres. There were so many extra things to take on. It was certainly in hindsight a very ambitious first movie to take on.

Did you get very involved in the world of men's figure skating?

Josh: [Laughs] One of the things we get off on is immersing ourselves completely in worlds. So we really got involved - we would go to all the sporting events. We finally showed up at the Ice Capades and we realized that we knew all these Olympic skaters intimately and we were like, 'How did we get here?'

Did you guys end up practicing a number yourselves?

Will: We ended up acting out a lot of the time, which was rather humiliating, and Josh actually broke his rib by falling on the ice.

Josh: Will Speck is a much better skater than I am.

I assume the actors had to do a lot of the skating themselves. What was that like?

Josh: It was really intense. They trained for about six months and John Heder broke his ankle about half way through production and we had to take a hiatus while he healed, but that gave us a couple of more months to train. Will Farrell trained while he was on vacation - it became a whole thing, it was like an action movie.

What's your future plan with commercials?

Will: We have a huge affection and new-found respect for the commercial world and we're super-eager to get back to it. We're just completing this pilot commitment [featuring the Geico cavemen] and then we're right back into commercials.

Josh: In the film world they call it the gentleman's sport because the film business just grinds you down. And there's something really pure about commercials when they're done great.

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