Ahoy, squirts! Quint here. I was 12 years old when I moved to Austin from California. It was a very important turning point in my life. My obsession with movies fit right into the atmosphere of the town, which at the time was a burgeoning indie film community. Richard Linklater’s SLACKER and Robert Rodriguez’s EL MARIACHI were hitting (or just about to hit) and put Austin filmmakers on the map. But a lot of people forget Mike Judge is an Austin filmmaker as well. In fact, before I was writing for AICN I did a series of interviews as a freshman in high school for my school paper: Bowie HS’s The Lone Star Dispatch. My first interview was George Carlin (yeah, I still don’t know how I pulled that one off), my second was A PERFECT WORLD’s screenwriter John Lee Hancock and my third was Mike Judge. Before I was even writing about movies I attended the regional premiere of BEAVIS & BUTT-HEAD DO AMERICA and met Judge there. He was very gracious in chatting with me occasionally after that, responding to a few emails every couple of months. I remember when I interviewed Judge for my the school paper I found it odd how much he was into rap when I asked about the music he listens to while writing. Little did I know he was working on OFFICE SPACE at the time and we all know how well he used music in that flick. Anyway, here’s the sit down we had about his new flick EXTRACT. We cover a lot of ground… looking back at OFFICE SPACE, looking forward to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s BRIGADIER GERARD, discussing Mila Kunis’ beauty, Tom Rothman, Bogart, John Goodman and much more. I even put my foot in my mouth towards the end when I mistake his composer, George S. Clinton, for the P Funk George Clinton. Tons of fun. Enjoy!
Quint: Well, congratulations on the movie and congratulations on actually having a studio that’s working on putting it out. (laughs)
Mike Judge: (laughs) Yeah, put it in some theaters.
Quint: I’ve been very happy to see that Miramax has been really behind this movie, especially after what happened to you on IDIOCRACY.
Mike Judge: Yeah, they have been good. I keep hearing people seeing the trailer in front of all kinds of movies and the posters seem to be getting out there.
Quint: The trailer has been probably on every movie I have seen in the last three or four weeks.
Mike Judge: I think originally, and I don’t know much about this, but they were going to put it on the Disney movies, I guess… I think OBSERVE AND REPORT and something else…
Quint: Which is awesome to think of that as a Disney movie, by the way.
Mike Judge: (laughs) They ended up. I think a lot of the theater owners and distributors just really liked it and they are putting it up on there own is what I’m hearing.
Quint: The trailer gets a laugh every time it screens.
Mike Judge: I have tried to see it. I haven’t seen it in the theater yet. Like some one said “It’s in front of HANGOVER at this theater in Santa Monica” and so I went there and by the time I got there, it wasn’t in front of HANGOVER anymore.
Quint: It’s weird. Sometimes those move around, too. As a nerd, you hear about a trailer or something and you want to see it on the big screen and everybody is like “It’s before this movie…”
Mike Judge: So, that happens a lot where they will shuffle them around?
Quint: Yeah and I think it’s always at the discretion of the theater. There are only a couple of movies a year where they are like “This trailer has to play on this print” and back in the day they used to attach trailers to prints, too. I don’t know if they still do that.
Mike Judge: Right, I guess that’s what it was with those Disney ones that they were saying it had to.
Quint: One of your biggest talents as a filmmaker is you give every movie you make a great shelf life. OFFICE SPACE is more popular now than when it came out. I would say IDIOCRACY is the same way. Do you do anything specifically when you are approaching the material or is it just the way…
Mike Judge: I’m not sure I know what it is except that I know I tend to… I think that part of it might be in the writing. I like comedy that you can kind of meditate on a little bit, with things that get funnier. Oddly enough, stuff that might seem very broad, like BEVERLY HILLBILLIES to me has a shelf life… Its track record is pretty good, but even though that is pretty broad, Uncle Jed, Buddy Ebsen’s… If he did that performance nowadays everyone would be breathing down his neck saying he’s got to be bigger, but I think also because I would like to think I’m pretty meticulous in the editing room finding the kind of performances that you watch over and over again, like in OFFICE SPACE while I was working on it in the editing room it was making me laugh more and more. I think actually my editor and people working on it weren’t really on board at first and then grew to become a fan of it while we were editing, so I think that’s kind of what happened with everybody. I think with that one I kind of had to hard sell everybody on it, but I don’t know. I’m not sure what that is. When I look at stuff that I like, like BIG LEBOWSKI or BADLANDS, these kinds of movies that I have watched a hundred times and I guess it tend to be more subtle things that grow on you. I’m not sure.
Quint: I think that all of those movies that you mentioned, they also did an impeccable job casting as well and I think that’s another one of your strengths… a lot of times they are not known faces, but you gather together the right people.
Mike Judge: I drive the casting directors crazy, because they will keep getting people that they think are good, especially for the smaller roles, and I will just say, “There’s no point. That’s never going to work.” People can be a good actor, but… I guess a lot of the stuff that I have written is not about the joke being in the line, it’s in how it’s preformed and the situation and so I drive the casting people crazy. On this one the studio wasn’t really involved with that, but I drive the studios crazy too, because I go through a hundred people and finally get the right person and they go “What?” That’s especially true with OFFICE SPACE. I remember Tom Rothman, and I love Tom Rothman, but he was saying Diedrich Bader… he did not want him to be that guy and he said, “If we can get somebody famous, let’s at least get somebody funny.” I was like “I don’t know what to tell you, I think he’s funny.
Quint: He’s one of the more memorable parts of that movie. People quote his stuff all of the time.
Mike Judge: There’s also stuff that will get laughs in dailies that you put in front of an audience and they are not laughing. And I get it. There was a scene in OFFICE SPACE that we shot that was like a dream sequence. I wasn’t my idea, but I put it in because one of the executives wanted it in there and it was the main character, Peter, imagining Michael Bolton and Samir in prison, so it was a dream sequence and it was very over the top. It made me laugh, but I kept thinking it was very… big ‘ol burly dude coming on to them… It was very much like the kind of joke you would see in a commercial or something like that and it played flat. Nothing. It was a big whole in the test screening. All the stuff that people were worried about were getting big laughs and then it gets to the scene and the studio said “Every scene should be like that scene!’ I mean I’m not going to sit here and be like “I’m always right and everyone is wrong,” but I think it’s really easy to… In comedy you tend to want to… I don’t, but a lot of people tend to go for these things that can get an easy laugh when you are shooting it with the dailies and then a lot of times those things just don’t work in the movie. It happens all of the time.
Quint: Let’s talk a little bit about your casting on this film, because it seems that you have more known faces in this one than in your previous work. You have Ben Affleck, who is really funny in the movie. He’s a funny guy, so I love it when he does comedy.
Mike Judge: Me too!
Quint: Affleck, Bateman, Mila Kunis, but then you have those kind of known faces, but you still pepper the movie with the Beth Grants and the Cliff Collins’…
Mike Judge: It hadn’t really occurred to me, but I guess we do have some (big names). Obviously Ben is a huge name. I remember thinking in the past “Is that going to be too distracting if you have this big person?” Then what I always think about… The movie BOTTLE ROCKET, the third lead in that Bob Musgrave, who plays Bob Maplethorp, is an old friend of mine. I knew him before the Wilsons did in Dallas and I remember when that came out and I went “This is the first time I’m ever going to see somebody I know, not somebody I have met after, but somebody I knew in a movie on the screen” and it didn’t distract me. It wasn’t like it took me out of the movie, like “There’s Bob, he’s in a movie.” It did for a couple seconds, but I figured as long as the person is a good actor and they’re just inhabiting the role, you are not going to be distracted.
Quint: Yeah, if they are right for the part, it’s not… Look at Bogart. He was always Bogart in everything he did, but you look at the vast difference between something like TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE and SABRINA, he plays these radically different characters, but you always recognize him as Bogart in the movie.
Mike Judge: That is interesting. Those two are pretty far apart. (laughs)
Quint: If you think about it.
Mike Judge: John Goodman, I’ve seen him in a million things and some movies not even that great. He was in that sitcom forever and then THE BIG LEBOWSKI I can still watch a hundred times.
Quint: His Coen work stands apart. I love John Goodman, even going to MATINEE and all of that stuff and I grew up on ROSEANNE, so he holds a special place in my heart.
Mike Judge: Yeah, me too. That’s what I mean, you are so familiar with him you think you have seen everything he’s got and it’s still him, but it’s like…
Quint: Then you see BARTON FINK. I think to a large degree you have that going on here, especially with Mila. I think you are one of the first people to really tap into just how ungodly gorgeous she is and kind of play that for all it’s worth in the movie.
Mike Judge: (laughs) I had written that a long time ago and I saw her in FORGETTING SARAH MARSHALL. I hadn’t seen that much of THAT 70s SHOW, so I wasn’t that familiar with her, but yeah I thought she was great. She’s a really smart girl. I think super hot girls, and to a certain extent guys too, they live by a different set of rules than the rest of us and I was at a camera store once, Precision Camera, and this really hot girl walked in and it just threw everything off, like suddenly you can’t get anybody to focus on what you are talking about. So, yeah I wanted to do something like that. It should surprise people to see her working in a factory and when she walks into a place, it throws everything off and so, yeah she was good.
Quint: I love that she is the strongest character in the movie. Every situation, she knows how to work it, even when she’s caught. I love that aspect of it. There are certain people in this world that can never be nailed to the wall and she is one of those people.
Mike Judge: She was so good in that scene. I remember when Jason is berating her, and that scene was a little longer and I cut a lot of it out, but it was longer before and when he was talking about the purse and what she did… Even while we were shooting, we were like “Hey, cut! Back off. Give her a break…” It’s funny, because somebody like that… “Oh I don’t want to see her get sad!”
Quint: “Don’t cry!” You know it and everybody knows exactly what she is doing. He knows what she is doing, but he just can’t help himself, yeah.
Mike Judge: I’ve known a couple of girls like that. When I was TAing Physics, there was this really good looking girl and she would be like… you had to get a sixteen out of twenty to pass and take the next quiz and she would have a fourteen and I would go “If I don’t give her a pass, then she’s just going to sit there and like…” (laughs)
Quint: With the glassy eyes…
Mike Judge: It was so hard to deal with. Yeah, (Mila) did a great job with that.
Quint: Correct me if I’m wrong, but is this the first movie you have shot outside of Austin?
Mike Judge: Yeah.
Quint: You shot it in California, right?
Mike Judge: I shot some exteriors here.
Quint: It still has kind of that Austin flavor.
Mike Judge: I wanted it to look like this corridor… sometimes Dallas to me looks like the Midwest and parts of Austin and I kind of wanted it to be like… I was imagining it like that old Adam’s Extract factory that used to be off of I-35.
I had them take a picture of that patch for kind of a background plate, but yeah we shot some of the more grassy areas around Hutto and stuff so it wouldn’t look so… In LA everything kind of looks like desert or Hollywood Hills. I was imagining somewhere like Kansas or Illinois or Dallas.
Quint: Did you bring a lot of your crew with you or did you kind of start with a new crew?
Mike Judge: We kind of had to do a new crew. I brought a few people, a couple of actors and… I did end up with some of the crew from here. I can’t remember…
Quint: Did that put you out of your comfort zone a little bit?
Mike Judge: I would have preferred to make it here, but on the other hand it was a little cheaper to do it there and this bottling factory was so perfect.
Quint: So, you found your location and you had to move to it.
Mike Judge: Also I think it would have been harder to get some of the actors in at that price and yeah it just kind of worked out. I prefer shooting here. The only drag about shooting here is you have to keep flying to LA back and forth during preproduction, so that part of it was a little easier and you wouldn’t always have to do that. I think you could make a movie here like (Robert) Rodriguez does where you don’t have to travel all that much.
Quint: On this film you also have George Clinton doing the soundtrack. It’s like you are trying to work with all of the masters of funk.
Mike Judge: Actually, it’s a different George Clinton than P. Funk. I thought the same thing, when I first saw his name on a Cheech & Chong movie, I was like “That’s so cool that they got him to do that, man!” For years I thought it was the same guy.They know each other. George S. Clinton is from Chattanooga Tennessee. He used to play piano with Johnny Paycheck and stuff. He was in some ways on the other end of the spectrum, but they are actually friends.
Quint: Here I am thinking I am all smart, like “You worked with Isaac Hayes and now you are working with George Clinton!”
Mike Judge: I thought the same thing and most people do, but it’s a different dude.
Quint: So, what are you working on now? Do you have another feature in the works?
Mike Judge: Well, there’s a thing my producing partners John Altschuler and Dave Krinsky wrote this thing called BRIGADIER GERARD, that’s based on these stories Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote, the Sherlock Holmes guy wrote them. I read these things and they were just really funny. It’s set during the Napoleonic Wars and it’s this character who is kind of like Clouseau, but he actually does kill people. He’s a total… everyone hates him. What’s interesting is he is telling the story as his own story, but you realize everybody hates him through his telling, even though he has no clue and it’s really clever stuff. John and Dave wrote this really great screenplay that everyone seems to like and I think I’ll probably produce it. I don’t think I’ll direct, just because it’s a really big project, but I think that’s the next big thing to happen probably in the next year or so.
Quint: Do you not see yourself making bigger movies or do you?
Mike Judge: Well, maybe, but it’s like with this one it might actually have to be shot in France or somewhere like that and I’ve still got my kids here, so I don’t want to go to Europe for months, but maybe so. I’m pretty comfortable doing small stuff like this actually. I really like working with special effects, the little bit I have done of it. It’d be fun to do a big effects movie if I had the right kind of backing for it. That’d be pretty fun. I like stuff like this.
Quint: Cool, well I think that’s about all I’ve got, so thank you so much for taking the time.
Mike Judge: Thank you, sir.
Hope you guys enjoyed the chat. I also got a chance to sit down with Jason Bateman, which I’ll have up for you very shortly. -Quint quint@aintitcool.com Follow Me On Twitter
