Mike Myers -- a Comedy Guru

It's taken five years and a couple of "Shreks" for Mike Myers to take on a new role.

Forget the green ogre. "The Love Guru" is here. Guru Pitka, an American-born, India-raised, spiritual self-promoter, is definitely a labor of love.

Created around the same time that Myers first cooked up Austin Powers, Pitka was perfected and refined for more than a dozen years at daily writing sessions and comedy club performances. Well, maybe refined isn't the right word; sex jokes, bathroom humor and ethnic gags abound as Pitka tries to motivate Myers' hometown hockey team, the Toronto Maple Leafs.

Crude and crazy as it gets, "The Love Guru" addresses many things the 45-year-old writer/producer/star holds near and dear. We tried to separate the ridiculous from the real in the following conversation.

Q "Love Guru" might be one of the silliest movies ever made. Yet it seems somewhat committed to its spiritual message.

A My favorite delivery system of ideas is silliness. A movie that I would aspire to, that in my opinion is the ultimate comedy, is "Dr. Strangelove." That's a farcical, silly movie that talks about Mutual Assured Destruction. Of course, the genius of Terry Southern, Stanley Kubrick and Peter Sellers -- I think that's a once-in-every-five-generations offering. But one's reach must go farther than one's grasp, as they say.

Q Seriously, what does "Love Guru" mean to you?

It was a light one, not too terribly deep, because I'm not terribly deep and neither was my father. I'm very humble, not at all lofty; I didn't come to this in any other way than that my father's death was a source of tremendous pain. I started reading voraciously. And I saw Deepak Chopra on "Oprah" and I went, "His philosophy and his writings speak to me."

Q You're friends with Chopra, you make fun of him in the movie, he even plays himself in it, and he recently defended "Love Guru" against ... well, one guy who's been complaining that the film insults Hinduism.

A This is a man who has not seen the film.

Q He claims Paramount said they would show it to him.

A No. They were never going to, because this is a film about DRAMA. I'll show it to those of the DRAMA community, of which there is no one because it's completely fictional.

The teaching is designed to be nondenominational and in a fantasy world. He has not seen the film. So I can't really comment except that it's about DRAMA.

Q OK. What's all this DRAMA about?

A Distraction, Regression, Adjustment, Maturity and Action. The underpinnings of it are -- and this took a long time, creating these fictional teachings -- with distraction you're distracted away from your emotional pain and brought to a place of calm.

So you think about regressing to a time when you were a little kid and you were told things about yourself that aren't true anymore. So you distract yourself out of your current pain and regress yourself to that time; that's the first A. You are mature. You accept responsibility.

Maturity is taking responsibility for your own health and happiness and you put all of it into action, which is the second A.

A They were the most supportive and positive people ever. They embraced this movie and made a million wonderful things happen. It was a fantasy and a dream come true.

Q That almost makes hockey sound enlightening. Is there anything to that, or is it really just an excuse for guys to fight?

A Hockey is life, and life is hockey. I, personally, play in a nonchecking, nonfighting league. Hockey is all about flow; it's got free-flowing substitution. And I think it has the best of the stick-and-ball coordination of baseball, the best of the contact of football, the best of the elegance and grace of figure skating, and the best of the overall strategic flow of soccer.

And it's my favorite water sport.

Q Justin Timberlake says you asked him to be "Love Guru's" well-endowed, French-Canadian Kings player because you were so impressed with his performance on your old alma mater, "Saturday Night Live." Care to clarify this apparent man crush?

Q How many years is it going to take before we see you in another live-action movie?