Ahoy, squirts! Quint here. Today is SUPERBAD Friday. Today actually sees the release of two AICN favorites. SUPERBAD is in wide release and THE KING OF KONG , in limited release. One of my final interviews from Comic-Con is just in time for SUPERBAD. I got a chance to sit down with Judd Apatow and SUPERBAD director Greg Mottola. In fact, this was my last interview, at the very end of Saturday. It was easily my busiest day, the day I missed the most cool shit, including 10 minutes of WALK HARD… which is discussed below. Anyway, despite all that I think the interview turned out really well. Both Apatow and Motolla were full of laughs and incredibly nice guys. We even get a nice cameo near the beginning of the chat. We begin as they admire my new flashy piece of technology, my Edirol Digital Audio Recorder. Enjoy!!!
Judd Apatow: Nice.
Quint: I know, forever I’ve had just a little crappy Sony micro cassette recorder and I just got this just in time for Comic-Con.
Greg Mottola: The digital kind? That lights up?
Quint: Yep. Now, you have met Drew before, right?
Judd Apatow: Yes, I sure have.
Quint: Have you met Harry?
Judd Apatow: No, I haven’t met Harry. Now, (the boys) just met Harry down in Austin at one of the events, for the first time. I think when they showed SUPERBAD down there.
Quint: Yeah, that was a great screening.
Judd Apatow: So I’ve heard. That started the whole ball rolling and everyone’s excited about the movie and KNOCKED UP we had a good screening.
Quint: At BUTT-NUMB-A-THON, yeah.
Greg Mottola: Is the BUTT-NUMB-A-THON done at certain times of the year or is that just once a year?
Quint: It’s for Harry’s birthday, so it’s a 24 hour film festival that began… well originally because he collected 16mm, he was originally just going to screen his 24 hours of some of his prints and then he started getting offers for premieres and stuff through the site and so it’s turned into this big celebration of film. There are a lot of premieres and there is a lot of vintage stuff, so he will go to some completely racist Al Jolson movie on 16mm and I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of this, but there’s this movie called WONDERBAR and AL Jolson plays a singer and there’s Busby Berkeley numbers and a big Busby Berkeley number at the end has Jolson in blackface singing a song called “Going to Heaven on a Mule.”
Greg Mottola: Oh shit!
Quint: It’s literally like a 15 minute song with pork chop trees…
[A guest joins us]
Judd Apatow: Favreau!
Jon Favreau: How ya’ doin’?
Judd Apatow: You’re lookin’ like IRON MAN! (laughs)
Jon Favreau: Thank you! (Turns to me) If it wasn’t for him, I don’t think I’d have a career, because we were working on UNDECLARED. We did the last episode and after that I got the script, because, I think, from that, for ELF and then ELF turned out well and now here I am and now…
Judd Apatow: Look at you, we’re so excited. They were excited just to pee next to IRON MAN.
Jon Favreau: Were you?
Judd Apatow: They did, Seth (Rogen) did. He’s like…
Jon Favreau: He peed next to IRON MAN?
Judd Apatow: Is Robert Downey Jr. here?
Jon Favreau: Oh was it him or a guy dressed as IRON MAN?
Judd Apatow: I don’t know…
Jon Favreau: Like a 300 pounder with a chicken bucket on his head… that could be IRON MAN…
Quint: That’ll be next year.
Jon Favreau: Great great, well congrats to you…
Judd Apatow: Did you enjoy our shout out in KNOCKED UP for you?
Jon Favreau: I didn’t see it yet, but I’ve heard about it. What’s great about it is you did a shout out in KNOCKED UP and it made more money in its first showing in New York than SWINGERS made in its whole run (everybody laughs), but congratulations and congratulations to Seth too, I haven’t seen him out here.
Judd Apatow: And you used Lyle (Workman), too.
Jon Favreau: Oh yeah? Oh great, yeah for the music.
Judd Apatow: For SUPERBAD.
Jon Favreau: Oh that’s awesome. I hear SUPERBAD is fantastic.
Judd Apatow: You’ll dig it.
Jon Favreau: I love all of your stuff. Take care!
Quint: Party crasher…
Greg Mottola: Jesus…
Judd Apatow: Yeah.
Quint: I did one of my favorite interviews I’ve ever done in the 10 or 11 years I’ve been writing for the site with Jonah (Hill), Michael (Cera) and Chris Mintz-Plasse. It was so random, we went from everything Sue Johanson on the OXYGEN network, “Talk Sex With Sue Johanson,” then we began imagining a Marie Callender bio pic…
Judd Apatow: Oh jeez…
Quint: Featuring her, because I mentioned that she looks exactly like Marie Callender, so those guys were a blast, but no I really love the movie and you are on such a roll right now.
Judd Apatow: Yeah, it’s exciting. It’s an odd exciting time and I’m trying not to think about it too much.
Greg Mottola: Someone’s just going to take it away…
Judd Apatow: It’ll just disappear…
Quint: So, Greg… was this the first film you directed?
Greg Motolla: No, I did a really small Indie film called THE DAYTRIPPERS that came out ten years ago and then I took ten years off…
[Everyone laughs]
Greg Mottola: No, I had a lot of films that almost got made and then I got into TV directing because of Judd. Judd called me to do UNDECLARED and I did six episodes of UNDERCLARED, two of which Seth wrote, and we did a table read of SUPERBAD back then…
Judd Apatow: With Seth and Jason Segel reading it.
Greg Motolla: And I’m one of those indie film people who kind of only want to direct his own writing and that’s part of the reason why I’ve only made one movie (laughs), but SUPERBAD was one of the only scripts that I had read that I felt “I’m the guy to make it… and I really wish I wrote it.”
Judd Apatow: We all love it and are kind of jealous of it, even though we are a part of it. (laughs)
Greg Mottola: It’s weird, I’m jealous of my own movie.
Quint: Just talking to Jonah and Mike Cera and those guys… it seems like they’re so funny just by themselves. During shooting, how much did you pull on that chemistry to bring it to that next level?
Greg Mottola: It’s weird, because we had cast Michael Cera first and he’s playing the straight man and everyone who would come in and read against him just wasn’t as one millionth as funny as Seth…
Judd Apatow: Which is really sad. I remember being very depressed that we were not going to be able to find the person who plays the part of Seth and I said “This is the first one where we might potentially have to settle” and we hadn’t considered JonaH because we thought he was too old, because he was Seth’s buddy in KNOCKED UP and then we realized “Oh, I guess it’s Jonah.”
[Everyone laughs]
Greg Mottola: Well, we never asked him to read for it, because I was being a stickler about the age, because he was playing Seth’s contemporary in another movie and it seemed that, you know, right before… we knew KNOCKED UP would come out first and it just didn’t make any sense and then we said, “Well, we’ll just have Jonah read it. What are we doing?” Then he was just so amazing. I mean he was the only person who was as good as Seth Rogen was at playing that part. And in his own way and not doing a Seth impersonation.
Judd Apatow: And let’s say it now, maybe better than Seth would have done it.
Greg Mottola: Maybe better.
Judd Apatow: Who knows?
Greg Mottola: It’s very heartbreaking the way he does it.
Quint: Maybe worse.
[Everyone laughs]
Greg Mottola: There’s also that.
Quint: We’ve been on such a great roll with comedies recently, with BORAT and the stuff you guys do. We’re finally getting these great R-rated comedies that aren’t afraid to be raunchy, but also show their heart and that’s where SUPERBAD and KNOCKED UP succeed the most, I think. Both of them wear their hearts on their sleeves. I think SUPERBAD had the most F-bombs ever dropped in a genuinely sweet movie.
Judd Apatow: (laughs) And we cut out as many as we could.
Greg Mottola: Basically every day we’d just go up to Jonah and just say “You can’t say fuck anymore… Stop saying fuck…” He just would say it every third word.
Judd Apatow: We’d watch the movie and go “How many of these can we remove?” We literally removed every single one in the movie that doesn’t get a laugh or isn’t connected to something else that gets a laugh and it’s still hundreds.
Greg Mottola: Hundreds… If you’d string them together, it’d go on for minutes.
Quint: Then you should just beep some of them, because that makes the word funnier. Watching CHAPPELLE SHOW uncensored isn’t as funny…
Judd Apatow: Yeah, that’s true.
Greg Mottola: Or like THE OSBOURNES.
Quint: Exactly.
Greg Mottola: In the UK they would show it unbleeped and it’s funnier when it’s bleeped.
Quint: Definitely. Especially when they bleep it, so it’s not the whole word, but you get…
Judd Apatow: You get a little piece.
Quint: You get the F and the K, then the beep fills in the U and the C.
Judd Apatow: The thing though is that when you can be R-rated, it allows you to be honest and you can show people actually behave and so I feel like it has taken the handcuffs off of a lot of people, because most of what I do during the day would be R-rated and so when you’re not R-rated, you’re very far away from reality, at least for the people we hang out with. (laughs)
Greg Mottola: Yeah, we’re a bunch of foulmouthed motherfuckers, so what can we say? It’s like you know, we put the Richard Pryor shirt on Jonah, just kind of as a lark, but you know, we all grew up on people like that that really made us laugh because they were just being honest and not dumbing it down and also movie comedy got so high-concept for a long time and you can’t get lower concept than SUPERBAD.
Judd Apatow: I’ve really decided that most comedy can be very low concept if it’s well explored.
Quint: It’s the characters that make it. Look back at any of your favorite comedies even going back to Abbott and Costello or even Chaplin or Keaton. It’s like the characters that work, not so much the idea… the intricate plot. It was all about finding characters that you like.
Judd Apatow: It’s like when we were doing KNOCKED UP: “Seth gets a girl pregnant,” that’s enough for the movie. “We’ve got to get liquor to get these girls to like us” that’s enough for the whole movie and how deep and rich can we go with a simple idea?
Quint: It’s like if you have the characters there, then it doesn’t feel like you’re skimping.
Judd Apatow: The only thing I didn’t like about this movie is I would watch it while I was finishing up KNOCKED UP and it always depressed me because I was like “How come this movie looks so much better than my movie? What is Motolla doing? Where is he putting the camera? What, he went low angle on that conversation in the parking lot of the liquor store? I would never go low angle on three dudes talking… What’s happening here? He graduated film school, I dropped out after a year. I don’t understand these angles… Does he even know what the lenses mean…?”
Greg Mottola: I think I stole that angle from GOONIES.
Judd Apatow: (laughs) Is that it?
Greg Mottola: Yeah.
Judd Apatow: Damn, I’ve got to watch more GOONIES.
Greg Mottola: Yeah, watch more GOONIES…
Quint: Richard Donner, man.
Greg Mottola: Yeah, just take it from Donner, just like how Orson Welles watched John Ford over and over again to teach himself directing, I just went with Richard Donner.
Judd Apatow: I watched SUPERBAD and was like “I guess people can walk around and talk and not just sit around on a couch…”
[Everyone laughs]
Quint: Also KNOCKED UP doesn’t have menstrual blood…
Judd Apatow: You’ve got to keep upping and raising the stakes every time.
Quint: I guess the whole premise of KNOCKED UP would keep from popping up…
Judd Apatow: Well… that’s true. (laughs)
Greg Mottola: There’s still stuff in KNOCKED UP that’s still a little…
Judd Apatow: What’s funny about that scene is that we debated it for years whether or not we could do it. Every time we would get close to getting the movie made we always knew we’d have to have the discussion with the studio about whether or not to shoot that scene and they would always say... you know the first note would always be “You’ve got to cut the period blood, man” and we kept trying to write a variation so we could shoot it both ways, so we could cut it out if people really were pretty negative about it and we really couldn’t think of one.
Greg Mottola: No, we couldn’t. There was the boner variation, which was just not satisfying…
Judd Apatow: Or just cut it out of the movie completely.
Greg Mottola: Actually had my wife read the scene, because I needed to just know, because I couldn’t ever have the experience of reading it as a woman and so… well maybe after some surgery I could experience reading it as a woman, but I didn’t want to go that far, so she read it and she gave me the thumbs up. She said “Yeah, uptight people are going to be pissed off.”
Judd Apatow: My wife had never seen the movie before last night and as soon as it started, she just turned to me and went “You’re going for this?!?” It’s funny because I showed her the SUPERBAD trailer and it says “from the guy who brought you THE 40 YEAR OLD VIRGIN and KNOCKED UP…” and she just said “Great, you’ve become that guy.”
[Everyone laughs]
Quint: Well, I’m thinking next year at COMIC CON… people wear the most obscure outfits and I think that next year you’re going to start seeing the…
Judd Apatow: The period blood pants? (laughs)
Quint: And people are going to be like “What are you?” They’ll just be wearing their regular thing, but…
Greg Mottola: Yeah, just some checkered pants with period blood on them.
Quint: After SIGNS came out, people were wearing the little Hershey’s Kisses headwear…
Judd Apatow: And that was your first tasted of WALK HARD.
Quint: Of WALK HARD?
Judd Apatow: Oh you weren’t there, we just showed like ten minutes from WALK HARD.
Quint: Damnit! No, I was up here, what did you show?
Judd Apatow: We showed the opening sequence where he cuts his brother in half with a machete…
Quint: And I missed it…
Judd Apatow: Which was really funny and then we showed one of the songs he sings with Jenna Fischer called “Let’s Duet,” which is all kinds of dirty metaphors.
Quint: Well, since you have a habit of showing your movies early in Austin, you just need to bring it down soon so I won’t feel incomplete.
Judd Apatow: Yes. Absolutely.
Quint: I think they very much want to pull you away.
Judd Apatow: Dude, you must be exhausted.
Quint: This is… like interview number eight today.
Judd Apatow: That is a lot.
Quint: I’m completely burned out, so I’m sorry if that really sucked.
Judd Apatow: (laughs) No not at all. I feel bad for you.
[Everyone laughs]
Quint: Thanks for chatting with me, guys. I’m really a big fan of the film and I wish you well with it.
Greg Motolla: Well, thanks for all the nice stuff you wrote about it already.
Judd Apatow: We’re just excited to get it out there, more than anything.
Now go see SUPERBAD! It really is all that. I’m actually really excited to see it again this weekend myself. Hope you dug the interview. Thanks for keeping up with all these interviews. I have to give a big thanks to Kraken for being my photobug during the Con and an even bigger thanks to Muldoon for his transcription services. I was teetering on the edge of suicidal darkness at Comic-Con as it was, but if I had to also transcribe these interviews I would have jumped into the Pacific, an over-stuff SWAG bag wrapped around my neck. Even with all these done, I’ve got tons more goodies still in the works. Two great character actors have been interviewed and some really interesting scripts have been received. Keep an eye out on the site, squirts! -Quint quint@aintitcool.com
