Judd Apatow: The Movieline Interview

With just days to go before Judd Apatow cuts the cord on Funny People -- his third, most thematically ambitious film -- Hollywood's reigning comedy mastermind sat with us this morning for an in-depth discussion that touched upon his childhood, his career, and his philosophies on what makes good movies work.

What's your mood going into the final stretch?

I'm excited being that the reviews have come in and they're very positive. The screenings have been going great. Everyone's been working their butts off doing all these talk shows. I don't think any movie has had more people on talk shows, because everyone is funny or a comedian. So our full-frontal assault is on.

What's worse -- waiting for overnight Nielsen ratings or waiting for opening weekend numbers?

The funny thing is that these days, the tracking is so accurate that you know a week before the movie comes out if it's going to be decent or good, and as you get closer, by a day or two before, when they predict what it is, they're generally not that far off.

What are they tracking it at?

It's tracking on par with all of our films, so no one's concerned. Then you just wonder what the weather will be that day and if you'll get lucky.

If I recall, Knocked Up opened to somewhere in the vicinity of $30 million.

Knocked Up opened at $30 or $31.

So they're saying around there?

Well, no one wants to say anything out loud -- people just get nervous. No one wants to look like they guessed too high. But for me personally, you want to be in the range of your other movies.

It was reported that Universal had tried to lobby you to cut a half-hour out of it. Is that true?

That is not true at all. Every movie I've ever made, I have this conversation. "Can you make it shorter?" I've had that conversation when the movie was 88 minutes long. I had the same conversation when we made The 40-Year-Old Virgin. But on this film, they were always supportive of the length, and in fact when the movie was pitched, it was pitched as a movie that would be ten to fifteen minutes longer than Knocked Up -- that was part of the original presentation.

They've always been very comfortable with it, mainly because when we tested the movie, it tested the same as Knocked Up and The 40-Year-Old Virgin. Do they wish I handed them a 90-minute version? Of course. But I think they think that about every film that's made.

I read that on your first series gig on The Ben Stiller Show, that you were reluctant to take notes. You responded by writing back, "I'm not changing anything. Now what happens?" Has that always been your M.O.?

It was in my television days, but television is very different, because when you make television you have a gun to your head, and that gun is cancellation. So when that gun is "we're going to make you add another pretty girl to your show" and you don't want to, the threat is "we're going to make you stop doing your show."

The thing that's different with movies is that when you pitch them your film or show them the script, you can decide if everyone gets what you're going for before you make the movie. So by the time I start shooting, we're all in agreement about what we're doing. I make sure that it's all very clear. And so as a result, since I started focusing only on movies, I haven't had any of those conflicts. That's why all the movies I've directed have been for Universal, because they're very supportive of how I work. I also work primarily with Sony, with the movies I've produced, because they've also just been fantastic about understanding what we're going for.

Let's talk about what you did pitch and deliver. The movie takes a somewhat drastic turn in the last act -- the theme shifts from [Adam Sandler character] George's illness to this sort of domestic issue with Leslie [Mann]'s character, and it starts unfolding in real time.

The reason I made the movie was that I wanted to explore what happens when somebody gets better. The first half of the movie is just a set-up for the second half of the movie. A lot of times when people are sick and they suddenly get better, they get thrown by it, because you're faced with all this wisdom when you think you're running out of time. That's why people write books like A Year to Live, where you try to imagine dying as a way to appreciate your life and enjoy yourself more. But when you find out you're better, it's very confusing, and all your old neuroses return. And now you're in a battle with your own psyche about how you feel about your life, and what's important to you. And that's the train I wanted to explore, and I did that through the story of a comedian who had all of his needs served because he's a megastar, and everyone does everything for him, and his life is very selfish.

And in the second half, when he pursues Leslie, it's meant to show how difficult it is for an egomaniac to attempt to domesticate himself. And it's also a little bit more farcical than the first half of the movie. It's a little bit like a "stranded in suburbia" moment for a big star.

And yet hanging over those proceedings is the threat of a divorce -- a very real threat. I know you yourself are a child of divorce. I'm wondering how much of that feeds your work. How traumatic was it for you, and is it something you try to work through still with your projects?

[Pause.] You know, it was the main trauma of my childhood. You know, I liked my life as it was. So like most children, I wasn't happy to see the family splinter apart. That's probably one reason why a lot of my movies have a message about the value of families. It also made me feel the need to learn how to take care of myself and have a career, so that I didn't have to rely on other people. And that's probably the root of any workaholism that I have. When you're a kid, it rocks your sense of stability. So those messages surface from time to time, but what would the alternative be -- anti-family movies? [Laughs] So I'm very comfortable with that.

And I'm always fascinated with people having problems, miscommunications, people under stress and how they deal with it. That, for me, is where drama and comedy comes from. So whenever anybody says, "Oh, why are they so immature? Why do they say those things?" It's because it's amusing -- those are the turning points of our lives. Who wants to watch people who have their shit together? That's just not why I go to the movies. That's the point of having giant robots! I don't want to see Shia LaBeouf on the day he doesn't fight robots.

But you could still have a solid marriage battling a problem together. I don't know why National Lampoon's Vacation just came to me, but they were very much happily married and yet the comedy was there.

Well, I think he was pretty close to having sex with Christie Brinkley.

That's true.

If we gave him ten more minutes I'm not sure what would have happened. [Laughs]

I heard somewhere that you brought James Brooks and P.T. Anderson into the Funny People edit bay with you as you were putting it together.

When I made this movie, I knew that it was very ambitious creatively, and I always ask people that I respect to see my movies and give me honest feedback, in addition to doing seven previews with real audiences. I do a lot of private screenings and screenings for friends. So this time out, anybody whose opinion I valued I showed the movie to, and there's no one whose opinion I valued more than James Brooks and Paul Thomas Anderson, and Cameron Crowe I showed the movie to. There were many people that were kind enough to tell me what they thought of where I was at, at that moment. Ron Howard gave me incredible notes at one of the screenings. I'm sure I'm leaving out a lot of people. Jay Roach also is always a go-to person that always has great perspective on all of these films.

But at the end of the day, you do have to decide what you would do, because even great filmmakers might go a different way with it. But it does give you a sense of if people are getting what you want them to understand. And people who make films, when they watch the movie, they're more aware of the levels that are being attempted.

Were there any significant notes that you took from any of these people that changed the outcome?

It's not that there was one note that was so specific. At the end of the process, Garry Shandling said, "I think the music cue starts at the wrong point in the last five minutes," and it completely transformed the last scene. Those types of notes can take the movie from working well to working great. Everyone gave me notes like that. James Brooks didn't go into the editing room, but Paul Thomas Anderson came in and sat with me as I made a couple very difficult choices about what to remove. He's a good friend of Adam's, and having seen the movie several times, had a lot of fantastic insight into what information was needed and not needed, and what was having an emotional effect and what was repetition.

Anderson having probably gotten the last, great dramatic performance out of Adam.

Punch Drunk Love is one of my favorite movies of all time. It's sweet and funny and I bawl my eyes out the last 20 minutes of it every time I watch it. I couldn't respect it more.

I want to ask you about something I've noticed. By all measures, you're known for being one of the menschiest guys in Hollywood, and yet, for some reason, people seem to like to pick fights with you.

I think people want to pick fights with everybody these days. In an Internet culture, people are much more interested in conflict than getting along. So there's always a search for that, and I get it. You know, people have their favorite new bands since the first album came out, and by the time you get to the third album people are looking for a problem. I think it's a natural behavior, and I've certainly been around long enough that it doesn't trouble me too much.

But these are people that you'd even call collaborators and friends. Like, I'm thinking about Mike White's comments to the New York Times, when he said you were making "comedy for the bullies and not the bullied."

Well, that's not what he said. He said he was concerned that -- I forgot the exact quote, you'd have to check it and see what it was -- but actually the situation was an odd one, because Mike's one of my very, very close friends, and I showed him the very first, incredibly long, three-hour rough cut [of Knocked Up], and he was doing an interview in support of me, about me. They didn't call him looking for conflict. And they probably called him in the morning before his coffee, and they did an hour interview, and they plucked out a line where he was talking about his thoughts of the very first cut of the movie. What it neglects to express is that the reason that I showed Mike was to get that type of feedback, and I had made adjustments in the 20 cuts after he saw it. So Mike apologized and said he was not in interview mode that morning, but people ask you about it for years afterwards, because everything survives and is Googled.

But that's OK, because I know the movies aren't about bullies. I think that couldn't be farther from the truth. The movies are generally about immature people who need to learn a lesson. They're not about people who hurt other people -- they mainly hurt themselves.

Do you think it was the same case with the Katherine Heigl Vanity Fair interview -- that it was plucked out of context?

I think that when you're doing a cover story and you're talking to people for hours and hours and hours, that it's very easy to find one line that defines the conversation, when people probably spend 45 minutes being incredibly gracious and kind to everyone they've worked with, and they pull the line and have a lot of power, out of the larger context of the movie.

Fair enough.

You really don't know. For me, whenever anyone talks about the issues of how men or women are portrayed in my movies, I think, I want to show women being just as awful as the men are being. In Knocked Up, there's an earthquake, and Seth Rogen saves his bong before his pregnant girlfriend. So I don't think that men are being portrayed as perfect people and women aren't. I think it's more about how there are so many miscommunications that make messes, and I'm trying to show that it takes hard work for people to work through those things and not bail on each other.

Right. I mean, I see that.

Yeah. I actually think if anything, I'm a pussy. I'd go the other way with it -- I don't think I'm a sexist, I think I'm just whipped!

But what do you make then of when Heigl then turns around and makes a movie like The Ugly Truth, which seems to portray her as the very thing she was railing against in Knocked Up?

I haven't seen the movie, so I really can't comment on what's in the movie, but I would say this: Comedy is funnier when people make enormous mistakes, and you can't judge movies based on the mistakes. You have to judge movies on the intention of showing the mistake, and what you're trying to say about the journey that they're on. People are supposed to be awful in movies. And what's fascinating is -- are they aware of it? Do they change? Do they want to change? What is the purpose of the behavior. Movies with sexism in it aren't necessarily sexist movies. They could be the complete opposite of that. They could be overly sentimental even. It all depends on context.

I wanted to touch upon some of the similarities between your life and the lives of the characters in Funny People. Specifically, Seth gets a call from Adam's character asking him to write for him for the first time, and early on, you got a similar call from Roseanne Barr. Was that your "call?"

I got many calls like that over the years. Any call where someone was giving me a job was "that" call. I started working writing jokes for some struggling comedians who just happened to have a lot of money first -- those are the first people who paid me. People who were trying to break in and needed some support. And slowly, I started getting jobs writing jokes for people like Tom Arnold and Roseanne, and then I was lucky enough to get a job writing jokes for Garry Shandling when he hosted the Grammys one year. And I generally was open to writing stand-up and specials for people, mainly HBO specials, when I first started out. And those calls are life-changing. When I got the call that Roseanne wanted me to help her write her act for an HBO special, it completely changed my entire life. Suddenly, I had a salary. I didn't have to be panicked about my rent, and I could focus completely on comedy writing.

Did she ask for you and your best friend, and you forgot to mention it to your best friend?

[Laughs] I never screwed over my best friend, like happens in the movie. I can't say I wouldn't have.

Is it true Tom Cruise once summoned you to his house?

Well, I wouldn't use the word "summoned." I had a meeting with Tom Cruise, because I think he's just unbelievable, and I've been a fan since the very beginning. And one of the great parts of this business is that when you're in between projects and trying to figure out what you're going to do next, you meet with people that you hope one day to collaborate with, and see if anything bubbles up.

Did you guys have chemistry?

Absolutely. I think that he is quietly one of the super-hilarious guys that is very careful about when he does comedy. But if you look back at his movies -- Jerry Maguire, Risky Business -- he's been as funny as anybody, in great movies.

So you wouldn't rule out maybe one day doing something with him?

No -- of course not! Of course not. I'd be lucky to get a chance. When these movies end, first you think of an idea, then you start thinking, "Okay, who would be appropriate for the idea?" So I'll spend the next year hoping something strikes me, then once it does, then suddenly you think -- "Okay, well, who fits?" And who wants to do it, and who's available? You know, I've wanted to work with Adam forever. And it took a very long time for everything to line up.