Interview: Mike Judge (Extract)

Writer-director Mike Judge has a new movie out this weekend: Extract, so here’s an interview with him from Cinematical. An excerpt:

Cinematical: I heard you had written the Extract script on spec. Is that usual for you? 

Judge: Well, it is from now on. When I originally mentioned the idea to my people out there — agents and what-have-you — it was right after Office Space had come out and Office Space was poison at the time, it had not done that well at the box office. So I got a pretty flat response to the idea of setting something in a factory. That’s partly why I started trying to write it by myself, just for fun.

Of all the ideas I had, Idiocracy was the one that everyone thought was really commercial. The wisdom at the time was, “Well, Mike’s a talented director, but he needs to listen to us more, do a big commercial movie,” and that’s how Idiocracy came about. That was going to be the big commercial movie. And then, at the first test screening of Idiocracy, the focus group was saying, “Well, that’s pretty funny but we were hoping it was going to be like Office Space.”

So this script [Extract], I let a couple of people read it — John Altschuler and Dave Krinsky, my producing partners who ran King of the Hill — and they liked it. We all thought it could be something more like Office Space, we could make it low-budget, do it independently with independent financing … which we did. Miramax came in when we were already kind of set to go, bought domestic distribution, and that completed the budget.

Judge’s other writing credits include Beavis and Butt-Head Do America (1996), Office Space (1999), and Idiocracy (2006), and the hugely successful animated TV series “Beavis and Butt-Head” (195 episodes, 1993–1997) and “King of the Hill” (executive producer) (232 episodes, 1997–2009). 

Here’s the trailer for the movie Extract: