Will Ferrell Tackles Spanish for "Casa de Mi Madre" WITH an ear attuned to distinctive voices and an innate talent for mimicry Will Ferrell would seem naturally suited to learning a foreign tongue. But somehow his explorations of new languages just seem to cause headaches. To prepare for family vacations to the homeland of his wife, Viveca, Mr. Ferrell used to study Swedish - no joke - at a school in Beverly Hills. "I went there until they asked if I could be part of the brochure," he said recently, "and I said, "No, please, I don't think so." " Then there was the time he was supposed to have spent last summer brushing up on his Spanish (three years high school, two semesters college) for his starring role in "Casa de Mi Padre," a movie presented almost entirely en Español with English subtitles. During a phone call with his collaborators before filming started, Mr. Ferrell recalled: "They asked, "How's your Spanish coming?" I'm like: "Not good. I haven't even started." " He added: "I was going to listen to Rosetta Stone, and I couldn't figure out how to get it onto my computer. It was a disaster. Nevertheless, with a little focus and some last-minute tutoring, Mr. Ferrell - the only nonnative speaker in an otherwise Spanish-speaking principal cast - was able to fulfill his duties to "Casa de Mi Padre," an unusual comedy even by his standards. The movie, which will be released on March 16, finds him far afield from crowd-pleasing hits like "Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy" and "Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby," and looks and sounds nothing like those films. Shot in 24 days on a budget of about $6 million, "Casa de Mi Padre" tells the story of Armando Alvarez (played by Mr. Ferrell), the ne'er-do-well son of a Mexican rancher whose manhood is tested when he falls in love with the fiancée (Genesis Rodriguez) of his flashier brother, Raul (Diego Luna), and is drawn into a violent conflict with a drug baron (Gael García Bernal). If that sounds like the plot of a garden-variety telenovela you might see playing on a cheap TV in a corner of your Laundromat, that is exactly the point. "For some reason," Mr. Ferrell said, "it just hit me that it'd be really funny not to have the joke be that I speak bad Spanish, but that I actually speak as proficient Spanish as I can muster, and everything is played really straight." Mr. Ferrell could not pinpoint more precisely where the idea for the movie came from, except to say it had been bouncing around his head for several years. Matt Piedmont, the director of "Casa de Mi Padre," and Andrew Steele, its screenwriter, suggested its origins could be traced to their time as writers on "Saturday Night Live," where they created deliberately awkward and oddly paced skits for Mr. Ferrell: character pieces about shirtless Bible salesmen, or a man who displays his patriotism by wearing star-spangled thong underwear to work. "You're really excited that it's just on TV, you pulled this off," Mr. Steele said in a joint interview with Mr. Piedmont. Mr. Piedmont added, "It's like a scam." But even with the involvement of Mr. Ferrell, whose last live-action studio comedy, "The Other Guys," grossed $119 million at the domestic box office in 2010, the "Casa de Mi Padre" team sensed this project would not be of much interest to Hollywood. It's like having the weirdest house on the block. There's no cops," Mr. Piedmont said. All the marketing places at the studios, they wouldn't touch it with a 10-foot pole. It was financed by Nala Films, a Santa Monica, Calif., company that has produced movies like "In the Valley of Elah" and "Dan in Real Life." Darlene Caamaño Loquet, president and chief operating officer of Nala Films, said that while she and the company's chief executive, Emilio Diez Barroso, with whom she founded the company, have Hispanic backgrounds, they do not specifically look for films aimed at Spanish-speaking audiences. "To us," Ms. Caamaño Loquet said, "the definition of Hispanic or Latino themes is not the same as the general entertainment mind-set." She added: "Our goal is to make mainstream movies that have people that sound and look like us. Because we are the mainstream. Still, a language barrier of sorts cropped up during production, as Mr. Steele, who wrote his screenplay in English, was often explaining to its translator, Patrick Perez, that he wanted the dialogue to sound clunky and imperfect. "It was a constant bargaining all the way through," Mr. Steele said. "We would have people come in to audition, and they would say, "Wow, this is a terrible translation." And you're like: "I'm so sorry. I know." " There was also the issue of the linguistically delinquent Mr. Ferrell, who with dialect coaching from Mr. Perez worked round the clock to master his lines and who on the first day of filming had to perform a lengthy monologue about his character's ideal woman.