Judd Apatow knows that in casting his real life wife and children in his latest film, the seriocomic Knocked Up spin-off/sequel This Is 40, he's inadvertently invited the world to peek into his own life, marriage, issues, and neuroses. Still, despite the many parallels one might draw between Paul Rudd's Pete (now a struggling indie record label owner) and Leslie Mann's Debbie (whose own small business and marital woes are nothing compared to impending big 4-0), Apatow insists most of This is 40 is fictionalized. Okay, much of it. Well, he doesn't escape to the bathroom to play games on his iPad like Pete does. "I’m more about reading the Huffington Post," Apatow joked.
Apatow may have built his comic empire on R-rated man-child tales rife with fart and dick jokes (not to mention sweet, sweet bromance) but with This is 40 the writer-director takes a considered look inward at marriage and relationships. They're never perfect — even between Hollywood creatives like Apatow and Mann, whose daughters Maude and Iris play heightened versions of themselves in the film — but as Apatow mused in our conversation rife with relationship real talk, personal reflections, and necessary tangents about Maude's real life LOST obsession and Apatow's 1995 kids' camp movie Heavyweights: "Imagine that you had to spend every second of the rest of your life with your best friend. How often do you think they would annoy you?"
Out of all the characters you’ve created onscreen, you spun off Pete and Debbie into their own film — the two characters whose lives are closest to your own. What was the impetus for wanting to explore this particular relationship further?
I have two interests; I’m trying to make funny movies and I also want to explore the human condition, and I want to be truthful about it. And the truth is in any relationship you have good times and loving times, and sometimes it goes really dark. And sometimes out of nowhere, something just blows. People bring a lot of baggage into their relationships and I think most people are pretty neurotic. Life is pretty overwhelming for most people. If you have any concern about being a good spouse and parent and having your job work out and your health — you’re just spinning too many plates. And once in a while we snap, so I was trying to show a truthful version of what happens when that occurs — sometimes that’s really funny and sometimes it’s just sad, and people’s fears come out.
When you first began working up the seeds of This is 40, was there any hesitation knowing that people out there might watch the film and wonder, ‘So that’s how it is in their family?’ about you and Leslie?
For some reason I didn’t worry about because I thought we already did it with Knocked Up. And it is a mutated version of us. It’s very heightened — a lot of the moments, the worst moments, for dramatic and comedy purposes – but for the most part we’re pretty boring. Once in a while it does go the wrong way, but then you have to figure out how to get it back. That’s what a long-term commitment is about; sometimes you make mistakes and you have to apologize and be kind to each other again. I always say to my kids whenever they ask me, ‘Why do you guys fight?’ — I say, ‘Imagine that you had to spend every second of the rest of your life with your best friend. How often do you think they would annoy you?’ And, you know, that’s how we feel about it. We love each other but we’re complicated people — and it’s hard for me to know if part of it is this is why we’re in this business, because we’re sensitive, complicated, wounded people and we’re trying to get along with each other. [Laughs] But most of it is fabricated. Nothing in the movie feels specifically true, it didn’t happen to us, but the emotions are very truthful, the feelings and the conflicts are all based on things that we relate to.
Even so, you know that some folks out there are going to imagine you sitting on the toilet playing Words With Friends on your iPad every morning.
I’m more about reading the Huffington Post. [Laughs] I would sit on the toilet all day if my legs wouldn’t go numb. If I could create a toilet seat that didn’t lead to my legs going numb…
This is 40 is also a rare opportunity to see Leslie front and center; she has this wonderful ability to play deep sadness and humor simultaneously. Do you have a favorite scene of hers from the films you’ve worked on together?
My favorite scene that we’ve ever done together was the scene in Funny People where Adam Sandler’s character apologizes to her character for cheating on her when they were young, and ruining their chance at having a long-term relationship. We shot it with three cameras and it was very emotional, and I was proud of both of them. Of everything I’ve done it’s one of my two or three favorite scenes. She has a way of being very funny while also being deeply emotional, so she can be dramatic and show pain and get laughs at the same time. I’m not even really sure how she accomplishes that, it’s just some aspect of her vibe which allows her to do many different colors at once. That’s the fun of working with her. And she’s always willing to do whatever it takes to get to an honest moment. She never says, ‘I don’t want to do that,’ or ‘That would be embarrassing,’ if anything she pushes to go farther and wants to get to the core of her character. There were definitely moments when we were making [This is 40] when we said, ‘What are we doing? This is crazy’ — especially if there was a day when we weren’t getting along. We’re making this movie about a couple and their love and their troubles, so on the days when we’re not liking each other it just feels like a complete waste of time.
Did it also then help to be making this movie? You have entire scenes where the dialogue pokes fun at couples therapy-speak, and it’s hilarious to point out how much, in the heat of the moment in a fight with your significant other, no amount of preparedness or civility training helps.
Yes! I know everything about therapy and so can break every rule of how you’re supposed to communicate in five seconds. You just have to learn to slow your brain down and be patient and not feel the need to win every moment, and I don’t know if there’s anything harder on Earth than doing that. Giving up your need to be correct is brutal, especially for me because I think I have to be very confident in my day job. All day long I’m making decisions very quickly and I have to be very strong about it, so for me to come home and be soft and open and not leap to pounce on a problem and come up with an answer and execute it is hard for me — and it’s truly annoying to Leslie. [Laughs]
I can imagine!
Any time a problem comes up, my thought is ‘Let’s solve this in the next five seconds and move on!’ And Leslie might want to explore the emotional life of some issue and tell me how she’s feeling for a really long time, and I just want to give her five seconds. That’s a big adjustment.
This is 40 is also really about parents and children — every one of us is messed up because of our parents, and by the same token we’re great because of our parents. Pete and Debbie both deal with that burden.
Whatever you didn’t get from your parents, you want more of from your spouse. So if you feel like you were abandoned, you’re going to be needy. If you feel like your parents were engulfing, you’re going to want to push your spouse away. It’s really hard to fight against that; I find that the imprinting you have when you’re a kid is really difficult to wipe away. Whenever I’m really upset about something it’s always a result of something from the past.
But that’s a revelation that you really only have when you’re in your thirties, maybe. I don’t know that I would have really understood it so much when I was 20.
Well, people are so busy trying to earn a living they put very little time into understanding themselves. That’s something that happens later in life, and partially what the movie’s about. I find myself embarrassed that I’m still neurotic about things that happened to me as a kid, because my memory’s disappearing so I don’t even remember the incidents, but I remember the neuroses are and they’re not going away.
How do you think viewers of a younger generation will react differently to the film?
A lot of it depends on what you’re looking for in a movie. Some people go to movies to escape. I like movies that make me think and feel and I don’t necessarily have to feel good the whole time. So I like movies to be as entertaining and hilarious as I can make them, but I’m also trying to stick in your craw a little bit and talk about some tougher ideas. If that’s what you want, I think it’s a movie you’d really enjoy. But if you really want to shut your brain down, then I have other movies that you can rent. [Laughs]
There’s a huge musical element to the film — you hand-picked artists for the soundtrack, for cameos, and Graham Parker plays himself in a plot line. Were these just some of your personal favorite artists that you wanted to integrate into a project?
I always use making a movie as an excuse to meet with or work with people who I admire, so I thought, maybe this time I’ll ask people to write songs for the movie, because I never do that because I’m afraid to get the songs from somebody and not like it. Then what do I do, say, ‘Sorry, Bono – you didn’t do a good job.’ You never want to be in that position. But this time I took the script to a few people and talked about possible thematic ideas for songs, even song titles. Lindsey Buckingham wrote three songs, Fiona Apple wrote a song, Norah Jones wrote a beautiful song, and Graham Parker wrote a whole bunch of songs for us, and we took those songs and Jon Brion produced all of them. He put the Punch Brothers on almost all of them, and asked each artists to play a part on each others’ songs. He did that with every song, so it’s a very unique sounding soundtrack album.
He made a musical family!
He did — and a lot of him had never met each other, that’s the fun part about it. So we have this fantastic soundtrack and the score is based on the songs from the movie. The album is pretty great.
Speaking of family, and where the lines between on- and off-screen families blurred for you: I love Maude.
Me too!
I’d watch her do this character for an entire movie. And you give her some heavy lifting for a young performer. How did you develop that character from where we see her in Knocked Up into her teenage years, and where did that LOST obsession come from?
Two years ago Maude watched the entire series of LOST in about six weeks. She was crying all the time, she was listening to the soundtrack, and there’s a song they play when people die on the show and she would cry every time that song came on. So I thought it was funny but I was also terrified for her. I could tell it was too intense an experience but I was unable to stop her from getting to the end, so I just tried to slow it down. I knew I wanted to write about that in the movie because it does represent everything you have to deal with when you have a teenager; you don’t really understand their technology, you don’t know what’s too strict, you kind of think maybe you’re screwing them up because your rules aren’t correct.. . and I told Maude it’s a heightened version of who she is, so when she’s fighting with Iris she’s really brutal on Iris. In life she’s not that easy on Iris, for sure, but we made it more intense and have her be more emotionally out of control than she is in life. She’s really funny and gets the jokes, and when I explain what the scenes are about I can get Maude and Iris debating any point and they’ll really argue hard and be truly mad at each other in front of the cameras. They know it’s funny and they’re looking for ways to make the scene work, but they’re pissed.
I have a friend who really loves Heavyweights.
That came out on Blu-ray this week!
It did, by sheer coincidence. It happens to be the first movie you wrote. On the Blu-ray special feature there’s an interview with you circa 1995 with the most amazing hairdo, which I wish you still had.
I wish I did! It started going and I started going Friar Tuck. You don’t want to be the guy with the bald spot and long hair. You just can’t do that. I did it as long as I could. Then they start telling you when you have long hair it pulls your hair and makes your bald spot bigger, so you’ve got to go shorter to make the bald spot seem smaller.
Fair enough! Now, you wrote Heavyweights in the mid-90s, which also happens to be the time period that Paul Rudd’s Pete is stuck in, the heyday of his youth.
I wrote that movie with Steve Brill and he had just written the Mighty Ducks movies. It was that time in life when you have no responsibilities, so you can just go to a summer camp and shoot a movie, and it becomes your entire life. So we cared so much about it and had such a good time. The Ben Stiller Show was just cancelled so it was fun to work with Ben as the villain, and that’s where we met Kenan Thompson and Shaun Weiss. I gave Paul Feig a part as the counselor who used to be fat who’s skinny now.
His outfits are the best.
[Laughs] It was like going to camp! We always wanted to get it out on Blu-ray and Disney gave us a budget to find all the old deleted scenes and to make some documentaries and do a commentary. So it’s a wonderful gift for the Heavyweights fan.
That was This Is 20s for you, then. When you think back to the person you were back then in your twenties and thirties, do you feel very different a person now?
I don’t really feel that different — and that’s actually my problem, I kind of feel like I’m not making any progress. But I’m thrilled that I’ve had enough projects connect with people that we’ve been able to make things and it’s not as hard as it used to be when we had to beg people to let us work, and there was a lot of interference because we didn’t really have any power. Until you’ve made people money, nobody trusts you. That’s where their faith comes from. ‘Oh, well, his last movie did well so maybe he knows what he’s doing!’ Especially with comedy, because there’s no predicting if the jokes will work. There’s no predicting if these stories will work. So any debate about if a comedy is going to function doesn’t really make sense. If you said, ‘I’ve got this scene and there’s a guy who runs through a cafeteria and he fills his mouth up with white stuff and then smashes his cheeks and says, I’m a zit!’ most executives would go, ‘Really? We’re paying you to do that?’ But it’s one of the greatest jokes of all time. So when people have faith in you, it’s much easier to do the work.
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