In a fluorescent-lit hallway at a Long Island nursing home, Judd Apatow sits on an overturned box beside a collapsed wheelchair, marking a two-page printout of jokes. Its 8:40 a.m. on May 19th, 2014: the first day of production on Apatows fifth directorial feature, Trainwreck. Residents mill around on walkers and canes; one wants to enter the homes glassed-in sitting porch, but Apatow has transformed it into a set. A production assistant tasked with directing elderly traffic reroutes her: Maam, Im sorry, were shooting a movie in here.
Trainwrecks writer and star, Amy Schumer, is on the porch, in front of the cameras, kicking off her Uggs for the heels that her character, also named Amy, will wear in todays scene. Colin Quinn, playing Amys ailing father, Gordon, slumps in a wheelchair beside her. In the movies opening flashback we see how Gordons cynicism about marriage and fidelity helped turn Amy into an alcohol-abusing, commitment-averse adult. Since this is a Judd Apatow movie, these personality traits are mined for laughs at first, and then gradually, falteringly, worked through. This scene motors the movie in a lot of ways, Apatow says. Amys troubled in her relationships because of her relationship with Gordon. And theres personal significance to this scene for Amy, because her dads in a nursing home with M.S. And yet since this is a Judd Apatow movie the scene is also an opportunity for a bunch of jokes about Viagra-powered octogenarian orgies. Its like Caligula in here, Gordon says.
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Over the past decade, Apatow has become the most prominent comedy-maker of our time. He is referred to less often as a director, it seems, than as a career-minter, a factory foreman, an emperor: His name evokes not only a particular comedic tone (heartfelt raunch), but also particular stars (Seth Rogen, Jonah Hill, Melissa McCarthy, all of whom he helped give big breaks), particular techniques (endless on-set improv, which he helped pioneer), particular gags (Steve Carell getting his chest waxed in The 40-Year-Old Virgin) and particular directors (Paul Feig, Adam McKay and Rogen again, all of whom have had major films produced by Apatow.) Besides Trainwreck, Apatow, 47, has directed four movies The 40-Year-Old-Virgin, Knocked Up, Funny People, This is 40 and as a producer hes shepherded Anchorman, Superbad, Pineapple Express and Bridesmaids, among other smashes, to theaters. His rsum transcends eras and involves numerous icons. As a teen, Apatow interviewed stand-ups like Jerry Seinfeld and Garry Shandling for his high-school radio station. (These are included, alongside newer conversations, in Sick in the Head, his recently published collection of comedian interviews.) In his twenties, while trying to make it as a stand-up, he opened for his buddy Jim Carrey and landed gigs writing jokes for Roseanne Barr. Later, he wrote on The Larry Sanders Show and did punch-up on the Happy Gilmore script for his longtime pal Adam Sandler. He was a driving force behind quickly canceled, highly influential cult gems like The Ben Stiller Show and Freaks and Geeks shows that highlighted, respectively, his twinned interests in absurdity and naturalism. More recently, Apatow helped Lena Dunham develop Girls, and he just helped Paul Reubens make a new Pee-wee Herman movie.
Present these bullet points of his rsum to Apatow, though, and he demurs. He prefers to think of himself as a mere bystander to, and facilitator of, other peoples genius, he says: Its about which collaborators you luck into working with. And Ive been blessed to meet some of the most talented people around.
Come May 2015, the final cut of Trainwreck has been locked, and Im walking up a path past tall trees and large spherical lawn ornaments to the front door of Apatows Brentwood mansion. Wearing socks, jeans and a polo shirt, he leads me into his office. Messes of paper and books cover every horizontal surface scripts he needs to read, novels and biographies he wants to. The mess presents a fitting visual corollary to his neuroses, which, after all these years, are still ample, surrounding him and gnawing at him. I have a very hard time filing things away, Apatow says. Someone will come in and straighten up, but then its back to looking like this in three days.
At the very start of making Trainwreck, you returned to stand-up after 22 years, dropping in on the Comedy Cellar in New York during shooting. Tell me a joke of yours that killed.
Id talk about how when you see Jews, they give you a look like, You cant join. We dont want you. If we want more Jews we will fuck our wives and create Jews. We will breed. That grew into a bit about how thats the best part of the Jewish religion: we dont expect anybody to join, so our philosophy isnt about being mad at anybody for not following our rules. We just want to be left alone safely. Today I still tell it, but its expanded into a larger discussion of how Jewish people dont mind if you draw us. But the truth is, we shouldnt want you to draw us because any well-done drawing of a Jewish person is inherently anti-Semitic. If you draw a perfect picture of me, its hateful! Thats why they never hire a caricaturist at a bar mitzvah thered be too many tears.
Was getting back into stand-up after so long a way to center yourself, or a way to disorient yourself and step outside of your comfort zone?
I felt like my self-esteem was lowering, and it felt like something that would help me fight that battle. I thought that me not doing stand-up had been a sign of low self-esteem, motivated by fear. I slowly realized that being willing to stand up and be yourself was a sign of higher self-esteem.
Why was your self-esteem low?
Theres probably no answer for that except thats where it all returns, in some primal way. In some ways its high, so thats whats weird. I mean, obviously, Im confident that I know what Im doing, but theres a little corner of me that returns to a low place, which never goes away. Mel Brooks talks about it how you always feel like someones gonna walk in and say youre a fraud and take your pencil away. It could be genetic. It could be my parents divorce. It could be not being breast-fed. It could be having a very emotional and loving but manic mother. You never find out what the source of it is.
How did stand-up help?
When Im working on a movie or a show, Im just so scared that its gonna be a disaster, and then if it isnt a disaster I have a sense of relief but I dont have an enormous feeling of joy. My years of stress far outweigh the moments of pleasure and relief. And then I was interviewing Pearl Jam for their last record, and I thought, when you write a song, if it connects with people, you have the pain of writing and making the song, but then the rest of your life you just sing it and have this communion with the audience, and you get pure joy. You get none of that as a filmmaker. That was bubbling in my head wheres my concert where I can play the greatest hits and just have fun with the audience? Then, I was working with Amy Schumer and she was always coming back from somewhere, telling me about some great experience shed had doing stand-up. I was jealous. Its the only thing I ever wanted to do. So I said to Amy, write up some premises for jokes for me, and Ill write the jokes. Give me areas. So she would send me areas, like what if instead of having girls I had boys. Things like that. And I started writing jokes and then I started remembering some stories I told on talk shows, and I put a set together.
Did you bomb?
I didnt. Amy was really funny because, in a very friendly way, she acted annoyed that it went well for me. She didnt get to enjoy me bombing. But Id told a bunch of those stories before what was harder was to try to write new things, which took a long time to figure out how to do again. About six months into it, I figured out my older comic voice, and I think I did a better job on the movie, because I was in a great mood from performing and it just wakes up some part of your brain that understands humor. I felt a little more tuned into whats funny.
Now everyone likes comedy. But back then, Im just alone in a library, looking up articles about Lenny Bruces death, not mentioning it to anybody.
You say you wished you had some greatest hits, but youve got all these movies and shows you made. You can see how many people bought a ticket to Knocked Up, and how many people downloaded 40-Year-Old Virgin or bought the Freaks and Geeks DVD.
Theres no pleasure from that. You always return to this place of fear. Its very motivating. I think probably the fuel for the whole endeavor is the fact that you never get comfortable. Its not like doing stand-up where if you have a set that doesnt go well you just think, Oh, Ill go up tomorrow. With a movie, its years of work, and then if it crashes, it crashes hard. And if it goes well youre like, Ahhh. . .but how am I going to figure out the next one? That thought hits you on the drive home. I dont want it to sound like its some horrendous experience, its just very intense. Im way better than I was when I felt like I never succeeded and nothing ever broke through that was painful.
Trainwreck is a big departure for you as a director in several ways: Its the first time youre directing a script that someone else wrote; there are none of the actors from your usual, core ensemble; its about a woman; and its not set in L.A.
I was certainly open to doing something different. I spent a lot of time trying to write a play, then another play, and I couldnt crack it, and I didnt write a single word in a year. Literally not one. I did a lot of research and it just didnt come. I dont want to give away the ideas, because theyre good, but one had to do with newly released convicts and the other one was set in rock & roll. But I just couldnt find the humor in it. Some of my research depressed me and I just hit a wall. I just got sad. In the meantime I was working with Amy and I loved what she was doing I said, I should take this to the end and direct it.
From Schumer to Lena Dunham all the way back to Seth Rogen on Freaks and Geeks, you clearly love working with people in the early stages of their careers.
Recently Ive been thinking, Goddamn it, I wish I could start all over. Maybe thats what I do by choosing to work with people on their first breakthrough projects, because in a way it forces me to always be in that moment of wanting your movie to work for the first time, or wanting to make your career. That always seems interesting: Trying to figure out why someone is appealing as a movie star, what stories they have to tell, but also the energy that someone like Amy has. Its the same with Seth or with Jonah Hill. That moment of, Oh, this is the big break, Im going to stay up all night, give my life to this. You dont do that again in the same way. You work hard, maybe even harder, but you dont have that energy of If this doesnt work, Im never gonna be allowed to do this again. Thats a pretty wild moment in peoples lives, when youre defining what youre going to be.
Lets go back to your own early days. Did your parents divorce drive you into comedy?
When I was a kid, I wanted to leave, I wanted to move to California I wanted to get out of there. Whatever was difficult in my childhood, from my parents getting divorced or whatever problems we had, it was my motivation to get a job and work hard. So it was positive in that regard. I never hear my kids today say, I gotta get the fuck out of Brentwood! The parking at Brentwood County Mart is awful! So I dont know if making their lives stable is helping them or de-motivating them. The worst parts of my life have been the reasons why Ive been able to accomplish anything Ive accomplished.
Whats it like where youre from in Long Island?
I started in Woodbury and then my parents divorced and we moved to Syosset, next door. They separated when I was in sixth grade, got back together, then separated again between eight and ninth grade, I think. Everyone in my neighborhood, theyd start out living in a big house and then their parents would divorce and they would move to a condo a mile away. The condos were filled with all the divorced families. I found a poem recently that I wrote when I was 15, called Divorce. I wrote it when I was a dishwasher at a comedy club on the weekends. Its so funny but its so sad. It predicts my entire life.
Apatow walks over to a backpack and retrieves an enormous stack of papers. He finds the poem. It consists of rhyming couplets like, For me there was separation with lots of tears/going out with my friends, marijuana and beers, then, a few lines later, I cover my pain with silly jokes/no more drugs or beer, just Cokes. By the end, hes found a degree of solace in an imagined show-biz future: Maybe one day Ill be a big star, driving around in a big car, and I wont mind that my parents split/Because it helped me write my comedy shit.
Its your career blueprint.
Isnt that crazy? I was trying to figure out how to express all of this. Then the next page is Funny Stuff About Divorce. I tried to list whats funny about it, but a lot of these things are really dark. It says Charging stuff, because my mother would charge stuff on my dads credit card without permission. This is me trying to survive. I should have done this the whole time I might have felt much better. Because I didnt go to therapy. My parents didnt send me to a counselor. My dad at one point left out a book that said Growing Up Divorced, and I thought it was for him, but I read it, and it was actually very helpful. That was his way of talking to me he left it out hoping I would read it. But he never asked me if I read it. There was no follow-up conversation. Maybe he saw that the book moved and hoped I had suddenly healed myself. Now divorce is all conscious uncoupling. Back then it was just tense and uncomfortable.
Its remarkable that you were already treating your misery as potential material.
I always knew that Richard Pryors family ran a brothel was his mother a prostitute? His grandmother was the pimp. I dont remember the exact details, but I remember thinking, I wish I had something like that.
Your mom moved out and you stayed with your dad. Did you take his side?
They separated and my mom went and moved to Southampton, and I said, Im not leaving my house. I was very close with my best friends, Ronnie and Kevin, and I was not gonna change schools. And later, I talked to my mom, right before she died, and she said that she thought she would only be gone for a couple weeks. I thought we would get right back together.
But your dad had a girlfriend, and she moved in.
Hes married to her now. My stepmother, Jackie, who couldnt be sweeter. But I was very. . .I wasnt warm, because my mom made me feel like just living with my dad was a betrayal. It made me feel like I wasnt allowed to relax or have fun, because if I was joyous in the house, it was wrong she tried to demonize the situation. And I didnt understand what they were fighting about. To this day I dont. Just the normal problems of a marriage. But there was a lot of energy from her, like, How can you talk to him? And she never took it back. In modern times people say terrible things and then that night they say, Im sorry, I just got upset, this is a really hard situation. My mom never ever said that, my whole childhood, after going on a run of hurt. We just started the next day, so that puts you on guard emotionally, it shuts you down.
You were made to feel that that if you were happy, you were betraying your mom?
Thats how I must have processed it. Because my dad didnt say bad things about my mom, for the most part. He tried to be a calm presence, but also we didnt talk about it. So that was confusing. They never resolved anything. It was a lot of years of conflict. Im sure my dad is sick of hearing me talk about it because he did a great job and he took really good care of me. But this becomes my origin story. It was a volatile situation for too long and it imprints you in ways that you never quite know.
Your brother came out of the same situation and is now an Orthodox Jew who lives in Israel.
Me, him and my sister, we were all split up between my parents we werent around each other enough to be a normal, healthy unit. I get along really well with my sister today. But as kids we had no tools to support each other throughout it. We were all just winging it. So, my brother, he was looking for something he could use to make sense of everything. And that became Judaism.
And for you it was comedy.
You get lucky that the thing you use as your defense mechanism actually turns out to be a way you can make a living. I could have been into playing the spoons! I lucked out that the thing I wanted to do turned out to be a business that gets bigger every year. I would have done comedy regardless. No one was interested in it when I was a kid. It wasnt a fun hobby that me and my friends all laughed about. Now everyone likes comedy, and if youre a kid you can watch Funny or Die videos and look up Hannibal Buress on YouTube. But back then, Im just alone in a library, looking up articles about Lenny Bruces death, not mentioning it to anybody! I had to wait till I was 17 and I moved to L.A. to find like-minded people.
Early on, before you quit stand-up, you shared bills with Jim Carrey and Adam Sandler. Thats a great way to feel outgunned.
It was like opening up for U2. Thats what it felt like. But I also knew that I was young and I didnt have any stories to tell, and I didnt even have strong opinions about anything. It took me a long time to think my voice was interesting at all thats why I wrote for other people for a long time.
Youve talked about being in the same room with Sandler, at a party or something, and how a part of you resented this innate charisma and appeal he had, and how people were drawn to him.
I didnt resent it. I felt bad about myself. Its funny because Adam has always been my biggest supporter. He has always believed in me more than almost anybody. I was his friend but I also knew, This guy is one of the all-time greats. But it is a weird feeling when youre hanging around with somebody that talented, that charismatic, and you really feel down on yourself. You feel your own lack of charisma.
Speaking of which: Please tell me about the time Jim Henson basically called you unlikeable.
Around that time, Adam and I auditioned for Henson he was trying to put together a show where comedians traveled across the country with video cameras. Adam and I made an audition, with David Spade, I think. We all got turned down. But when I didnt get the job, the feedback was, Jim Henson would like to pay you a thousand dollars for all of your ideas for the show, but he thought you lacked warmth. It was probably incredibly accurate on some level not about warmth but my confidence was so low I was tight and probably still am, honestly, in life and art. Ive been talking about that onstage, though, because it was my worst fear.
Its almost like Kermit stepping off of your TV and telling you that.
And I was a big Sesame Street guy. It only would have been worse if Mr. Rogers said it. That was the first nail in my performing coffin.
But in 2015, at least from the outside with respect to Jim Carrey and Adam Sandler and their enormous talents I would much rather have your career than either of theirs. Theres a sense in which you found your path.
Well, what theyve done is astounding. When I look at them I cant believe what theyve accomplished. Think about how many great movies, great albums, great moments all the times they were riotously funny. Its easy to beat up on people for their attempts at growing, but it takes great courage to be funny, to go for hard-funny, for thoughtful-funny, to go for drama. To be doing Punch Drunk Love and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. We are getting older, and everyone faces somewhat of a Jerry Lewis moment. I have it I write movies about bromances and being immature and at some point I have to write movies about fatherhood and being sick and mortality. Everyone is figuring out how to be creative in the next phase of their life.
Seeing Adam Sandler in his first movie, Billy Madison, when I was a kid helped shape my sense of humor in a huge way. But Im not alone in my impression that he went on to make a lot of junk. Like, Why is this guy doing Grown Ups, much less Grown Ups 3?
I dont think you need to call it junk, because thats hurtful. People really have their balls out. Its a naked thing to try to make people happy and try to express yourself that way. And the culture is pretty brutal on anything they dont like instantly, and theyre especially tough on people who have had success. Theres a lot of anger at people who are doing OK. Thats why when you go on Twitter everything is #richmansproblems or #firstworldproblems or #whitemansproblems. Sandler said something interesting after we did Funny People. He said, A lot of people think that these movies, or Punch Drunk Love, should be held up higher than the hard-funny movies, but we know how its as difficult, or maybe way more difficult, to make You Dont Mess With the Zohan. When comedy is done well it seems effortless. And even in comedies that its easy to not take seriously, there might be a couple great set pieces in there something thats the funniest thing youve ever seen. I appreciate peoples efforts to spend a lifetime trying to make other people happy. I love that Sandler is devoted to just hilarity. And hes still the guy in Punch Drunk Love.
Funny People and This Is 40 didnt do nearly as well at the box office as your first two movies. Maybe part of the reason is that they arent about outsiders and losers, the way 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up were. Youre asking audiences to care about #firstworldproblems.
Now that some of the movies have been out for a while, I have people talking about moments in This Is 40 that they relate to what its about connects with people as they reach certain moments in their lives. You might be at a moment in your life where you dont want a movie like that. It might scare you about your future. Other people are in the thick of it and say, Oh, this is exactly my life.
Youve said you came at comedy yourself as an outsider as someone whose comedic fuel was being the small kid picked last. Do success and power make it harder to be funny?
The feeling of being the little kid never goes away. Its in your wiring. I still feel like a weirdo in most situations. I will still talk to someone at a party and think it didnt go well and then Ill think about it all night. The other day I was in a restaurant and the head of Sony was there with someone else from Sony. And I walked over to the table and I didnt have any clue what to say so I just said [his voice gets disconcertingly, awkwardly, loud], HEY HOWS IT GOING! And theyre like, . . . Hi. And I went, WHAT DO YOU GUYS EAT HERE! And one of them said, . . .Fish. And I walked off and for weeks I just thought, I am such an idiot. What was I talking about? Like, Im always a fool. Theres enough fool in me to keep me going. And my kids certainly have the proper lack of respect for me, which keeps me from ever feeling that wise.
Early in your career, you kept making shows that kept getting canceled. Were those early failures like The Ben Stiller Show and Freaks and Geeks the audiences fault, the networks faults or the shows faults?
You never find out. You can blame it on marketing, you could say, well, Freaks and Geeks was on only 12 times over 26 weeks, so how was it gonna find its audience? Or you could say, I dont know, it didnt set the world on fire right away and we werent Empire! But we were on Saturday night, up against Cops, and they moved us to Tuesday, and we felt like there wasnt a lot of marketing energy behind it. But as far as the audience, it feels like everyone has seen it now.
It was ahead of its time in a few ways.
Yeah. Today, you dont need as many viewers. Today Freaks and Geeks would be a hit! But at that time you couldnt survive with 7 million viewers. I was like, Maybe Im fringier than I thought. Maybe this is the equivalent of a Replacements record I like the Replacements more than almost everything in the Top 40.
Directing The 40-Year-Old Virgin, you finally had a hit. In part its because you played ball with executives and took their notes more graciously than you had before, right?
None of my yelling had seemed to have done anything positive. It seemed like every time I yelled, we got canceled. And so I realized I should just listen and see what their concerns are. Some I agreed with, some I didnt, but there was a solution to all of them. I tried to spin everything they were concerned about into something positive. So they said, Steve Carell looks like a serial killer he looks like Jeffrey Dahmer. And then we said maybe we should just talk about that in the movie, and that became a part of the story.
Whats another time where a studio note made your work better?
I remember the only large note that Donna Langley, the president of Universal, had on Knocked Up: I dont think the third act is that funny. And at that time I didnt have Martin Starr and Jay Baruchel and Jason Segel at the hospital during the delivery. I said, I could chuck all the friends into the waiting room. It changed the entire movie. Thats a really smart executive, whos not moving where youre putting the commas, but is giving you very effective notes.
Why did The 40-Year-Old Virgin click?
The movie is about shame, so I understood that. It was about being afraid that no one will like you, so you hide in a stock room. And I got really lucky I was lucky enough to produce Anchorman with Adam McKay and Will Ferrell, and that led to meeting Steve Carell. And I wrote 40-Year-Old Virgin with him it was Carells idea. I just lucked into the greatest comedy-writing partner you could hope for, and applied my take on things. Wed split scenes. Id sit at home and one day the fax would go off like it used to in the old days, and Id read what Steve wrote.
On later movies youd write scenes with your wife, Leslie Mann, whom you also frequently cast.
Leslie is really the partner on all of it, coming up with ideas shes essential in every aspect. Shes so funny and so fun to write for, but she also inspires me to write drama, because she sees herself as a dramatic actress who, when she does it, it comes out funny. Almost nobody can play things as emotionally as she does and still get huge laughs while breaking your heart.
Its easy to beat up on people for their attempts at growing, but it takes great courage to be funny, to go for hard-funny, for thoughtful-funny, to go for drama.
Youve said writing This is 40 with Leslie allowed you both to have a very intimate conversation about other people you were working things from your own relationship into the movie.
Its a way to communicate. Leslie and I always debate whats true and whats not. Its all fabricated, but it all comes from some emotional truth. Its not fun watching a normal couple do a pretty solid job in a movie its only fun to say, Heres everything at its worst. Heres the week it just went to shit. So its an expression of our feelings. In real life, we dont yell at the kid at school or at the kids mom!
Youre active on Twitter, and one of the ways youve used it is to hammer Bill Cosby repeatedly. Why do you think the sexual-assault charges finally stuck against him, in the realm of public opinion, in a way that they didnt stick with, say, Woody Allen, when his daughter Dylan asserted repeatedly that he molested her?
I think people dont seem to want to believe women who are attacked. I dont know if its that we just dont want to believe terrible things happen, especially when people we love are accused like, How can my favorite person in the world do it? Its much easier not to believe the accuser. With Cosby, for a while people were thinking, Theyre all gold diggers. And at some point enough women came forward that the world knows this happened and that he is clearly some sort of sociopath. With Woody Allen you cant compare all the cases, but the sheer numbers effect it. Its very sad when someone like Dylan comes forward and doesnt get the level of support she deserves, but it might be easier to try to ignore her than it is to ignore all the women who accused Cosby.
People say, Separate the art from the artist. They want to watch Annie Hall and Bill Cosbys old routines and still enjoy them. Can you do that separating?
No. Not at all. Some people say you have to separate it, then they list everybody whos done terrible things who made art. I guess thats an argument you could make. The Cosby thing I took seriously because I know one of the victims, who is not going to come forward. I had a personal connection to it, where somebody that I care about said thats exactly how it went down. Obviously you have to make sure things are true. Everything everyone says isnt true. But if you dont believe women or take their accusations very, very seriously, women will not speak up. And if women dont speak up more women will be raped. So its really all about preventing other people from getting hurt, because Cosbys on tour ignoring all of the victims is a signal to other victims that when you speak up, people will not take care of you and do something about it.
Beyond your collaborations with Leslie, youve lately come to be seen as a champion of funny women onscreen, whether its producing Bridesmaids and Girls or working with Amy Schumer on Trainwreck. Was this a conscious, concerted move?
A lot of it isnt about any conscious choice other than whos crazy funny. With Bridesmaids, Kristin Wiig is as funny as anyone Ive ever seen. I didnt really think about male or female. And when the movie was done theres a moment where people say, This could be good for the issue of female comedy if its a success, but we didnt think about it. We just thought, Wow, theres a lot of funny women in this movie, thats kind of cool. There was no political agenda to it. But then it wakes you up you realize, this is an underserved market. It seems epically wrong that women have to be dragged to so many male-dominated movies. And there are so many women that deserve big shots. Then I got handed Tiny Furniture, Lenas first movie, and I thought, This is exactly what I love. Shes doing a personal movie that stars her family and its in a modern, James L. Brooks style. Id love to work with her. It isnt a male or female question Im not bumping into five other male Lena Dunhams that Im turning down. Im not meeting tons of Amy Schumers that Im turning down.
But theres a received industry wisdom that youre using your stature to help break down.
The simplest way to look at it is, because there havent been anywhere near enough movies made by women, written by women, starring women, its all fresh terrain, and thats exciting. I know that women want good movies. I didnt need to be told that. Its sad that there are so few. Theres not a big run of Gilda Radner movies we were left with. A lot of these people didnt get those opportunities, and they should have. Im aware, because I live in a house with three beautiful, hilarious, awesome women, that their point of view is fascinating and they should be able to tell stories in equal proportion to men, and it would be so wrong if for whatever weird reasons those doors were closed to them. And Ive watched Leslies career and seen what the scripts are, and how many are good and how many are bad, and I always thought, If I can be helpful in having the good stack be a little higher, Id like to. And I became a little more attuned to how lazy some of the writing for women was they were just being used to service men or get a guy from A to B, or be an object of affection. But I look at it more as a fan I want to see Amy Schumer in a movie.
Theres a parallel between Trainwreck and Knocked Up, in that theyre both about fuck-ups fumbling toward maturity. We just havent really seen a woman portraying this kind of fuck-up before.
I like movies about people who are a mess. And there are all sorts of people trying to get their acts together. If anything, I get accused of being conservative, that theres some sort of hidden conservative message! But I see it as a human message were all trying to connect, and when youre young or immature or damaged its tricky to figure out how to make it work. And yes, I like when couples try to figure it out. I do.
There is something lower-case-c conservative about the value your movies place on building or protecting the family unit.
I like the family unit. And I could make a movie tomorrow that ends with everyone being single and deciding they dont like each other, but thats not such a bold move to make, either. Theres only so many ways to end these movies.
It seems epically wrong that women have to be dragged to so many male-dominated movies.
One of the other common raps against you is that you dont know when to end them.
Im rarely trying to compress time, I guess you could say. Theres an aspect of it which is me wanting to live with things and liking to create things that feel like life. Im not the person that wants to speed the whole thing up. Im trying to slow life down so it never ends and that may be why all the movies are 15 minutes longer than some people would want them to be. But then, I always say, Youll go home and watch eleven episodes of Breaking Bad in a row, so fuck you, I want my 15 minutes!
Describe your job as a producer what do you do?
I can use a sports analogy: Each time out, youre kind of creating a team, and sometimes youre the quarterback, sometimes youre the water boy, sometimes youre in the stands watching, sometimes youre just the guy who delivers beers to the stadium. In every situation what I do is very different. Some things work because I was smart enough to shut up and let people do their work to know that Greg Mottola is gonna kill it directing Superbad, so Im gonna stay home for as much of it as possible. And then in another situation I know if I get deeply involved itll be better Im happy to look for, like, holes in the ship. Im plugging holes, trying to anticipate problems, trying to make sure people have enough money. One of the reasons a lot of modern comedies work correctly is because we take a little more time, and that costs a little more money. These arent expensive movies but if you get 40 days from the studio instead of 30 youre gonna get more jokes, more scenes, and youre gonna have more time to think. So a lot of my job is to try to figure out how to create a financial situation where people can do their work and not rush their way through important scenes.
How do you get your way with studios?
I was powerless until a few things made money. The more things do well, the easier it is for me to create supportive situations for filmmakers. But I always believe that finding a new comedian is a great business. People love that they didnt know Zach Galifianakis when The Hangover came out. People love Rebel Wilson in Pitch Perfect. They love Melissa McCarthy in everything she does with Paul Feig. Thats my main pitch: People love stars but they love finding the next person, too, and its inherently less expensive to make a movie with someone in the earlier part of their career. And when it breaks, its good business.
In terms of technical craft, how have you changed or improved as a filmmaker over the years?
Im not technically adept, and I cant really put into words how I approach it. Im not one of those people that loves breaking down film. Ill never be on set and go, That reminds me of this shot from Psycho. I just say, Move it a little to the left. I like movies that feel real. I dont want you to ever think about me, so I dont try to do anything where youd go, Nice shot. Im trying to make you forget its a movie.
How long did you hold out before searching for your own name in the hacked Sony e-mail database?
I didnt. I didnt do it.
Really?
My assistant took a quick peek, and after 20 seconds I said, Lets not do this. So I havent done a deep search. But the stuff that came out early was really funny to me because it was me asking for things and Sony saying no. Me wanting to make Pineapple Express 2 at a certain budget and them forwarding the e-mails to each other saying no.
That whole hack unfolded in the context of Seth Rogen and James Franco making The Interview. What conversations did you have with Seth in the middle of that controversy?
I didnt talk to Seth that much during it, but its scary when people can just post a threat online and everyone has to decide how to react to it. You can shut almost anything down with a well-placed threat. So we all have to decide, well, what do we react to? How are we going to deal with that in the future? I was always fully on Seths side about it. He and Evan Goldberg and James were aware that there were bad people running North Korea and they were trying to satirize that situation, and in addition to doing something really funny, they wanted to get people to pay more attention to it. So Im proud of them for making the movie and I get really upset when people disparage it, because that took a lot of balls. Its a fascinating moment in movie history, but I just look at it in the simplest way, which is that someone should make fun of evil people thats our job. I dont know if anything productive comes of all of it, theres no way to know. But were supposed to tell the truth.
When you have so many friends also making movies, how do you not compete with them? If you want Melissa McCarthy but Paul Feig has already locked her up, or you have a release date and Seth Rogen has a movie coming that day, how do you make it all work?
It happens. I used to get a little more thrown by it, but now Ive resigned myself. If you read the Sony hacks, one of the e-mails was me trying to not have Trainwreck come out on the same day as Pixels, the new Sandler movie. I never want to be put in a situation where theres anything positive in doing better than any of my friends. But we cant control that, so Ill send an e-mail and get ignored. And the dates shifted anyway. When it comes to actor availability, yeah, that happens all the time, where I cant book somebody Ive worked with before because theyre working with someone else I know. It can be frustrating, but its par for the course. Thats another reason I like working with people who have never starred in movies before, because theyre always available! One of the reasons I started doing that was because there are a lot of people I wanted to work with and I would keep trying to line things up, and I could never get their attention and get it on the calendar. Theres plenty of times when I call someone up and say, Wanna do another one? and they say no, because everythings going great and they have a lot of options. I have to just decide its all fluid: I should be happy for everybody.
In Funny People, Sandlers character, George Simmons, is diagnosed with a terminal disease. Is one of the subtexts that being a comedian having that particular personality and wiring is almost a worse fate than having a fatal blood condition?
My mom died of ovarian cancer, and I was writing Funny People while she was sick as a way of processing it. I had one idea that was about someone who got sick and learned nothing from it, then I had another idea about how it felt to be a young comedian mentored by older comedians. Then I realized, it can be the same movie. But it was written in deep sorrow. I didnt want to market the movie by talking about my moms journey when she was sick, but I did notice that whenever she thought she was gonna die she seemed happier, and let go of her neuroses. And then she would take a new medicine and think everything was gonna work out, and she would start calling me up to talk about financial concerns and all the things that generally bothered her.
Another thing about Simmons is that hes in this huge mansion, richer than his wildest dreams, and hes miserable. That connects to the mansion were sitting in now, and it connects to something youve said about how, as an entertainer, all the success in the world wont heal you.
It doesnt do anything. There is a great distraction in thinking, When I get to the top of that hill, its all gonna be awesome. And then when you get to the top of the hill, youre like, Oh, I guess now I have to really deal with my problems, because that didnt work at all. I talk about this onstage a bit: Its why Putin is taking back Ukraine. Hes just looking for new hills to climb. You need new impossible goals to distract you.
Theres a story about Steven Spielberg calling your office once to give you a compliment, and you had your receptionist lie and say you were out of town, so that hed send a nice letter that you could frame.
Yes, thats a funny story. I needed that letter! And you would think that filled the self-esteem tank. Like, That should be good for a decade. But it might have been good till noon the next day.
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