“I always feel like I’m 14 YEARS OLD,” says Apatow.
“If I haven’t matured by now, I think it’s not going to happen.”
goofy humor and emotional resonance in a way that few others do.
“We try to come up with a movie
that seems really stupid and then
make it better than people expect
it to be,” he says. “We’re always very
sincere about the emotional parts
of the movie. We don’t just throw
those in to get away with the jokes.
We start there and then try to make
it funny.”
For Apatow, a big
part of making it funny
is pushing the envelope
on dirty, and he is often
credited with resurrect-
ing the R-rated comedy.
“It’s very hard to be
honest and real without an R rating because
everything people do
in their normal lives is
R rated,” he says. It was
frequent collaborator
actor-writer Seth Rogen
(Knocked Up, Superbad)
who inspired him to get real—and
raw—with his latest projects. “Seth gave
me his script for Superbad, which was
filthy, and we never could get it made,
but we were inspired by how funny it
was,” Apatow says. “Then, when I was
writing 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up I thought a lot
about Superbad, how funny it was and how it went so far.
In a lot of ways Superbad is the inspiration for a lot of the
tone of what we’ve been doing.”
Now in the enviable position to get virtually anything
made, Apatow is sharing the all-access pass with the friends
and associates he has made throughout his career. Rogen
has penned two more movies for him, including the soon-to-be-released Drillbit Taylor, starring Owen Wilson and
directed by another old friend, Steven Brill. Actor Jason
Segel (How I Met Your Mother, Knocked Up), who started
out with Apatow and Rogen on the cult-classic TV series
Freaks and Geeks, also has written and starred in one of
Apatow’s upcoming films.
“Most of the really funny guys are also good writers,”
Apatow says, “so I always encourage people to learn how
to do that so they can control their own destiny.”
Apatow’s many writer
friends play an important role in his creative
process, too. Drawing on
the collaborative experience he accrued while
working on TV series like
The Larry Sanders Show,
Freaks and Geeks and
Undeclared, Apatow often
brings in friends to give
him the kind of uncen-
sored feedback he needs to
get his scripts up to speed.
“I like to do table reads
and have lots of writers come
and listen to the script being
read out loud, and get very
frank notes,” he says. “That’s
been part of why I think some
of the movies are working so
well, because I really run them
through the gauntlet.” With
a polished script in hand, Apa-
tow still encourages his actors
to make the lines their own
and to expand on the script when it makes
sense. “Probably the most fun is being on the
set with the actors and realizing that a scene
you were excited about is coming out very
well and new ideas are blooming,” he says.
Though he’s not sure what his next
directing project will be, Apatow’s calendar is full of the
low-budget, low-wattage films he’s famous for, as well
as star-driven projects with the likes of Will Ferrell and
Adam Sandler. It’s pretty heady stuff for a guy whose stock
and trade is the lovable loser, but Apatow isn’t afraid that
success will spoil him.
“I always feel like I’m 14 years old, and I can’t shake it,”
he says. “If I haven’t matured by now, I think it’s not going
to happen.”
And what would he be doing if writing, producing or
directing wasn’t on the menu?
“I’d probably be washing dishes at El Torito. That
was my favorite job I had as a kid,” he says of the chain
restaurant on Long Island. “Everything I do is about thinking and figuring out what’s going to go wrong, how to get
something across properly, but when you wash a dish it’s a
very Zen-like experience. Sometimes I miss that dish.”
Walk Hard: The Dewey
Cox Story (top) is a spoof
on Walk the Line. Drillbit
Taylor, written by Seth
Rogen, stars Owen Wilson
and opens in March.
