Interview (Written): Judd Apatow

The writer-director talks comedy, TV, movies, politics, and more.

An in-depth conversation in Vulture with Judd Apatow whose film credits include Celtic Pride, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up, Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, Funny People, and This is 40, and TV credits include The Ben Stiller Show, The Larry Sanders Show, Freaks and Geeks, Undeclared, Girls, and Love. He’s also a prolific producer with such credits as Superbad, Step Brothers, Bridesmaids, Trainwreck, and The Big Sick.

Here are some excerpts from the interview:

Why exactly are you spending the summer slogging through stand-up gigs again? I mean this as respectfully as possible: Is going back to the work you were doing as a 21-year-old your version of a mid-life crisis?
I don’t really know the answer. Maybe I just have low self-esteem and need to hear people laughing at my jokes. Or maybe I’m overcompensating for the part of me that never wants to leave the house. When I go back and think about what I was doing as a young comedian, I know I had a great passion for stand-up, but I was never sure if I was the one who should be doing it. I was a big enough fan of the work to know how much better other people were than I was. Just to pick one person: The first time I saw Rob SchneiderSchneider’s stand-up led to a writing gig on SNL in 1988, which led to roles like Orgasm Guy, which led to movies like Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo and The Hot Chick. He can now be found citing the Nuremberg Laws as an argument for anti-vaccination. do stand-up back in the late ’80s, it was really intimidating. I thought I was good, but I wasn’t anywhere near his level.

So in this moment, what’s the answer? Are you back onstage because of low self-esteem or a desire to get out of the house?
In simple terms it’s this: Stand-up is what I love more than anything else. There’s something fantastic about thinking of a joke in the shower and then doing it that night at the comedy club. With a movie, it’s years of work, getting very little feedback, and then you find out in two hours at a screening one night if all that work was worth it. The feeling I get from stand-up, of being more connected to audiences, is really good. Stand-up makes my other work better, too. When I’m giving notes to Pete HolmesThe 38-year-old comic is the latest protégé in Apatow’s live-your-art boutique industry. Produced by Apatow, Holmes’s new HBO show Crashing follows a divorced comedian named Pete who sleeps on the couches of established comics and tries to make it in the Village circuit. Holmes divorced at 28, and had similar broke-but-hopeful stints in New York and L.A. or Paul Rust,Rust plays the male lead in Netflix’s Love, an Apatow-produced series about a volatile couple, written by Rust and his wife, former Girls writer Lesley Arfin. In line with Apatow’s greater paradigm, a geek gets a girl but struggles to keep her, and comedy and drama battle for top billing. it’s now coming from a place of being in touch with what people out in the world are actually laughing about. It’s easy to lose touch with reality when you’re just sitting in your house.

— —

There was a New York Times piece that Ross Douthat wrote after the Girls finale that argued the show was a critique of liberalism, insofar as it had all these young liberal men and women and all their liberalism got them were unstable messy lives. And it’s no secret that your movies tend to resolve with characters finding happiness in pretty traditional relationships. At heart, are you a traditionalist?
I don’t know about traditionalist, but what I want is for characters to do better. I want people to get it. There’s only so many stories, right? Either someone gets it and learns a lesson or they don’t. The 40-Year-Old Virgin: either he has sex and it’s bad, or he has sex and it’s good, or right before he has sex he gets hit by a truck and it’s sad that he never got to have sex. I know who I am as a storyteller: I want to feel hope about people’s abilities to incrementally learn. This is related to the reason why you don’t see movies and television about Republican and conservative ideas — because Republicans are trying to present themselves as correct, as clean, as Mike Pence–y. Unlike them, I want people who actually evolve. Does it make me a traditionalist if the way they evolve is toward a healthy relationship? Maybe.

Could you write a movie about someone like Mike Pence?
When you see Mike Pence, you think there’s a lot going on inside that guy. At least I do. But the problem is that Mike Pence will not tell you that. Lena [Dunham]“I was just blown away,” Apatow once said of Dunham’s pre-Girls independent film Tiny Furniture. “I thought ‘this is a young person making a James Brooks movie.’” He then sent Dunham an email, which she thought was a prank: “If you ever want someone to give you a lot of money and screw everything up, we should talk.” Apatow became executive producer for Girls, which was already in development for HBO. will. There’s an openness and an honesty to what she does. She’s saying, I have these values, but I’m also a human being, and I make mistakes, and sometimes I’m crazy and selfish and other times I’m loving and supportive. And that’s why there’s no incredible, hysterically funny show about conservatives, because they’re too concerned about trying to present themselves as correct. They’re all going, I’m not neurotic. I’m not a disaster in any way. They don’t admit how lost they are. There’s something dishonest to me about that; it’s living a lie. So for someone to say that Girls is a critique of liberalism because the characters’ lives might be disasters? No, those characters’ lives are disasters because they’re human.

— —

There’s another comedic shift that’s happened that people have held you up as being at least partly responsible for. It’s so rare that we see broad joke-joke-joke comedies like Airplane! or The Naked Gun or Spaceballs anymore. Is that just because your more naturalistic style is what’s in vogue? Or do you think audiences don’t want that kind of over-the-top, totally unrealistic comedy anymore?
When you make the list of the best movies of all time, you’re always going to put Airplane! on it. And if movies like that aren’t being made right now, it’s because people aren’t smart enough and funny enough to make them. I don’t think it’s a result of studios or audiences rejecting anything or trying to copy anything else. If someone made a movie as funny as Airplane! right now it would make a billion dollars. Occasionally people try; most of the time they fail. When you do a big, broad comedy and it fails, it’s an easy target for criticism. I also don’t think critics have a great respect for the effort it takes to make people piss their pants laughing. They think it’s more honorable to show someone in torment, but being able to do that doesn’t make you more of an artist than being able to make The Naked Gun. It’s not hard to make people cry. Kill a dog.

— —

You work with young writers all the time. What’s the note you give most often?
I know what I used to say to Seth Rogen: “Less jizz, more heart.”

Was that a note you gave on Bridesmaids?
The truth is that my notes are always the same. I push people to dig deep. If we can get to a very honest place, the comedy part won’t be difficult. The jokes are what’s easy. If you talk to Amy Schumer about her life and her relationships and her relationship with her sister and her father, there’s an amazing story there. For a long time while we were working on what became Trainwreck, we only talked about the movie as if it were a drama. Once all of the emotions were credible and organic, it wasn’t hard for her to then make it hilarious. Nothing I tell people is very complicated.

Great interview, really worth reading. To do that, click here.

Twitter: @JuddApatow.