Ahoy, squirts! Quint here. During SXSW Warner Bros brought out many of the OBSERVE & REPORT team to screen the flick, which I flipped for. I’m a big Jody Hill fan, going back to when I was sent screener of THE FOOT FIST WAY maybe a week after it premiered at Sundance. OBSERVE & REPORT feels like a Jody Hill movie, following a character you should despise, but end up rooting for. Capone demanded an audience with Anna Faris and when the dude gets a crush your only choice is to get out of the way. I don’t want to tell you what happened when I bent to pick up a fallen penny next to Jamie King… I heard a one-man stampede before I was… Well, when I woke up I was bleeding from places I didn’t realize I could bleed from. So, Capone got Anna without a fight and I got the guys. This interview was outside, on the balcony of the Four Seasons hotel. I mention this because something happens that I think you’ll enjoy… a bit of nature that interrupted the interview. I not only have photos (courtesy of Kraken), but also audio of the moment. What you’re about to read is my first real introduction to Seth and it was clear right off the bat that he was as likable as he is onscreen… and he knows the site, which helped break the ice, too. As I readied my digital recorder, he asked who I was on AICN. I told him and he was like, “Good, I know you,” then continued on talking about how I could have been a random talkbacker, which then leads to a mention of one of our more... known residents… That’s about all the set-up you need, I think. The interview is a lot of fun! Enjoy!
Quint: Yeah, I know. I could have been like “Hey, I met Harry once! I’m with Ain’t It Cool!”
Seth Rogen: Exactly! “I’m SmurfLvr87”
Quint: It would be cool if I was one of the more notorious talkbackers, like “DannyGloversDickBlood.”
Seth Rogen: I know! That guy! (laughs)
Kraken: He’s become unbannable, hasn’t he?
Quint: He’s gotten too powerful!
Seth Rogen: Has anyone met him? Does anyone know who he is?
Quint: No, but I have talked with him a couple of times… He’s been surprisingly nice to me, but seems to hate everybody else.
Seth Rogen: Whatever Blockbuster Video that guy works in must be a really happy place.
Quint: Maybe Ain’t It Cool talkback is his therapy, where he gets it out.
Seth Rogen: Exactly.
Quint: Well, I saw the movie last night and I thought it was great!
Seth Rogen: Thanks, man!
Quint: I loved that you took a role that’s kind of different.
Seth Rogen: Yeah!
Quint: Everybody keeps bringing up the whole Travis Bickle parallel, but what I love about it is that with the Apatow films, all the characters in those movies wear their hearts on their sleeves. They are flawed characters, but in a different kind of reality. That’s like eighties reality and this (OBSERVE & REPORT) is like seventies reality.
Seth Rogen: Exactly! I love that. I think… As soon as I saw FOOT FIST WAY, that’s what I loved about it, that he’s taken this guy that you would never make the star of a movie and he’s made a whole movie about him, you know? And that really is kind of like a lot of the stuff that they did in the seventies with those Cassavetes movies and stuff like that…
Quint: Or Paul Schrader…
Seth Rogen: Yeah, Paul Schrader’s shit, exactly, like BAD LIEUTENANT and stuff like that, but no one had ever really made a comedy about one of those guys you know, until I saw FOOT FIST WAY and that’s what it really seemed like to me, like an odd seventies sensibilities, but with a comedic slant to it, you know? Then when he described this movie to me and just kind of said like a comedic KING OF COMEDY or TAXI DRIVER… one of those movies about a guy who just kind of sees the world as a wrong that needs to be righted, you know? That to me just sounded hilarious and fucked up. With him behind it all… I had already seen the pilot of EASTBOUND AND DOWN at that point and kind of knew where he was heading with all of this stuff…
Quint: Which is amazing!
Seth Rogen: It’s great, so it was just exciting for me, you know?
Quint: Definitely and I just love characters that don’t have filters or if they do have it, instead it’s at some real bizarre level that doesn’t catch the same shit as others. I was talking about that with Jody [Hill] a few minutes ago. I was telling him that people can relate to a character like yours in the film, because people wish that they could do that. That’s why people love FALLING DOWN.
Seth Rogen: I was literally just talking about FALLING DOWN yesterday!
Quint: People love that. They can put themselves in the character, like “I wish I could say that to that asshole.”
Click here to read along with the next bit in Amazing Sound-O-Text!
Seth Rogen: No, definitely! I think it taps into like a primal… Like I saw TAKEN recently, which I thought was actually kind of entertaining, because it does tap into a very primal like “I’m going to fucking get those motherfuckers who fucked with my family,” you know? I think that’s what this movie does in a lot of ways I think. It taps into a primal rage that you are not who you want to be and you will take violent action to become that person.
Quint: And it’s a testament to Jody and to your preformance in the film, but by the time the OLDBOY-like beat down goes down, that’s a moment that shouldn’t be a cheering moment. Like in any other movie that shouldn’t have been a hero moment… the crazy guy standing up to the cops, beating the shit out of them…
Seth Rogen: Yeah, that’s a terrible thing. (laughs)
Quint: In the reality of the movie, though, you are with him.
Seth Rogen: That’s what’s great about it, you know? That’s why Jody is good. He can pull that off! It’s not an easy transition, you know? It’s a fine line and the fact that people are with him, the fact that at the end, when I end the case with the pervert in the manner that I do and people react in the way they react, to me, that shows the movie is successful. When people cheer and just can’t believe it… It works, you know? It does exactly what he was trying to do and I love to be in a movie that can elicit that kind of reaction and you can tell people themselves are confused at their own reactions towards it, because it’s really fucked up!
Quint: It’s shocking. What makes comedy work is the unexpected and in that scene you’re talking about you expect what happens to happen, but in a different way.
Seth Rogen: Exactly!
Click here to read along with the next bit in Amazing Sound-O-Text!
Quint: And what’s fucked up even beyond that is that not only does that happen, but that’s also what redeems the character for all the straight guys in the movie.
Seth Rogen: Exactly! And somehow everyone thinks it’s heroic and it somehow just works. What I love about Jody, is he really paints the characters into a corner and then somehow gets them out, like in the eyes of the audience. He has the character do things where you are thinking “How will I ever like this person again? How will they redeem themselves from this? What is the thing that they will say that will actually make this OK?” They see me having sex with Anna Farris while she’s unconscious and you could tell the audience is thinking “What?!? How are they going to make this acceptable?” “What can possibly be said that makes this something that’s alright to put in a movie?” And then he somehow comes up with the one thing that makes it all okay you know and it’s the same thing with the chase in the end, like I know the audience is thinking “How is this possibly going to end in a way that is satisfying? What is he going to do? How is this going to resolve itself?” And it does and he found the one way to do it and it does everything that you need it to and it’s very satisfying. It’s not much different than like action movies work, where you put your characters in these impossible situations and it’s like “How are they going to get out of it?” What the fuck is that?!?
Quint: The last sound of your life.
Seth Rogen: Exactly! “Waa-kaw!” “It’s too late!” (laughs)
[Kraken shows Rogen the above picture, snapped right when the bird cawed]
Seth Rogen: Jesus Christ! The last image of me you will see… But yeah, that’s what he does. (laughs)
Quint: He also gives everybody their moment to shine. I love that Michael [Pena] has his scene. I love that Anna [Faris] has a couple really great scenes.
Seth Rogen: Even how Jesse (Plemons) saves me in the fight, yeah everyone has their payoff.
Quint: I think that probably speaks to your character’s redemption more than anything.
Seth Rogen: That he wins over this guy…
Quint: Yeah, at the beginning he just doesn’t buy into your world view, but he is willing to throw himself out on the line like that.
Seth Rogen: It’s great. Those little moments really pay off and he does it in a really organic way where they don’t feel like the pay offs. It’s so lame in a movie where you see a character like “Everything’s great in my life, I could never go have lunch at this restaurant” and then “What the fuck’s going to happen? Maybe they will go have lunch at that restaurant at the end of that movie…”
Quint: And there will be a thumbs up?
Seth Rogen: Exactly. and he manages to have those setups and payoffs, but you don’t even realize that they are happening, which is nice.
Quint: It’s because he doesn’t really focus on… He makes a little bit of a moment when Jesse jumps, but like him being arrested is all in the background. It’s all background stuff.
Seth Rogen: That’s true.
Quint: I love that stuff.
Seth Rogen: I love that he doesn’t go out of his way to explain too much also. There’s not a lot of exposition.
Quint: And you know, your moment with Patton [Oswalt] and your moments with Aziz [Ansari], all of those are standing out, but what is really impressive to me is that they don’t feel like islands in the movie, where it’s like “Okay, this is the cameo scene here.”
Seth Rogen: That’s true and Zene Baker, the editor is really awesome because, I think, the movie could have felt episodic. I think by it’s nature, it is a little episodic and they actually kind of restructured it a lot in the editing to make it flow a lot better and not seem like “Oh, now there’s the chunk where he’s trying to be a cop” and “There’s the chunk where he’s trying to hit on Anna.” They really, in post, found a way to structure it in a way that it played a lot less episodically, which was good.
Quint: So, with the amount of action that you have to do, like the OLDBOY fight especially, there’s just something very brutal about that fight and I love the sound design choice to hear the glass in the flashlight break with that one hit.
Click here to read along with the next bit in Amazing Sound-O-Text!
Seth Rogen: That was pretty awesome. That was new. I hadn’t seen that before this screening, but that was pretty impressive actually. That fight was awesome. That was something that the studio… like the whole concept that I lock myself in a mall and the cops get sent in and I fight them, that was something that had kind of disappeared from the script by the time it had gotten to me and then I was like “What about that thing you described, where I beat the shit out of all of the guys?” He was like “Yeah, the studio wasn’t so hot on you fighting a bunch of cops as a heroic moment…”
Quint: Because it’s not they’re crooked cops…
Seth Rogen: No, they are just guys trying to do their thing and they are literally told to get me out of the mall and I pound their heads in for it! And I’m amazed again they let us do it and it’s kind of a heroic moment and it was an ambitious way to film the fight, too. It’s a pretty cheap movie and if that didn’t look good, it would have sucked, you know? It would have been like the most awkward lame attempt at capturing what the OLDBOY fight scene was and…
Quint: It’s brutal. It’s epic, man.
Seth Rogen: People can’t believe that it actually happens. I think they see the cops running at me and me running at them and they just think it’s going to end somehow. (laughs) No, we actually fight…
Quint: You are going to have to get used to it now.
Seth Rogen: Exactly! I like it. To me the action is fun and it heightens the comedy, you know? I like impact. To me, when you can feel the impact, that’s what I like in a movie and I think it literally compliments the humor in a lot of ways. I think it can be a physical payoff to a setup.
Quint: And humor is so rooted in physical comedy. The Buster Keatons and such. There is kind of a small line between the two.
Seth Rogen: Yeah, but to me honestly… like the scene I always think of is in PULP FICTION when they blow that guy’s head off in the back of the car by accident. That to me, when I saw that and saw the reaction it got, I was like “I want to do shit like that in the movies. If I could do something as fucked up as blowing a guy’s head all over the place and having it elicit wild ruckus laughter… that’s the kind of movie I want to make.”
Quint: It’s not even mean laughter either.
Seth Rogen: Just like “Ahh!”
Quint: “I shot Marvin in the face…”
Seth Rogen: “I didn’t mean to!” It’s a hilarious scene and it doesn’t feel jokey, it feels very real. In the reality of the movie, they fucking killed that guy!
Quint: The chaos of it is “I didn’t fucking hit a bump, it was your fault!”
Seth Rogen: That’s one of my favorite scenes ever in any movie and I feel like in a way PINEAPPLE EXPRESS is a whole movie based on that scene.
Quint: That’s an extremely violent fucking movie!
Seth Rogen: I think scenes like that fight we have in this is… we are kind of going for a similar thing, just shocked by what you are seeing and that it can be handled in kind of a funny way.
[Publicity tells them to wrap it up.]
Quint: Can I get one quick thing in about GREEN HORNET so DannyGlovers doesn’t kill me?
Seth Rogen: Yeah, exactly! They need to talk shit about something! “What are you going to hate about me this week?” (laughs)
Quint: Michel [Gondry] is now on the movie, yeah?
Seth Rogen: Yeah.
Quint: That’s really great. I love Michel.
Seth Rogen: It’s awesome!
Quint: Is Stephen Chow completely gone or is he still playing Kato?
Seth Rogen: No. As of now it is not 100%. I think…
Quint: I think he’d be an amazing Kato.
Seth Rogen: Yeah. There’s a very real possibility that he will end up being Kato and there’s a slight possibility it won’t work out, but honestly we just aren’t 100% sure right now, because he does his thing… He’s the king of the world in Hong Kong, he doesn’t need us! (laughs)
Quint: He’s probably the biggest movie star I’ve ever met.
Seth Rogen: Yeah, exactly. But him and Michel have met each other and talked about it, so we are moving in that direction which is exciting to me. To me, that notion is a very cool one.
Quint: Cool thanks man, I really appreciate you talking to me.
Seth Rogen: Of course, no problem!
As you can probably tell, I was grinning ear to ear after that one. It was just a fun, funny conversation. That dude's laugh is so contagious... like Ricky Gervais' laughter... If I hear it I'm cracking up, too.
And we were either being attacked or propositioned by that bird! Have to say... I've probably done near a thousand interviews in the 13 years I've been here and I've never had that happen. I’ll leave you with a shot of it!
-Quint
quint@aintitcool.com
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