Satiristas Page 14

  And I could feel a huge amount of tension, so just as a joke, to break the tension, I said to Johnny, “Well, who has custody of yours?”

  PAUL PROVENZA: That was a pretty ballsy line, since Johnny was notoriously touchy about anything to do with his personal life.

  LILY TOMLIN: It didn’t seem ballsy to me, it was just kinda the truth. I mean, who did have custody of his kids? I’m sure he didn’t have to expend too much effort raising them. That’s often how it is.

  I’m sure I wasn’t aware or intending to make any kind of powerful statement…it was just the truth. And it was a way to make him laugh.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Do you care to, or think that you make any kind of difference?

  LILY TOMLIN: Especially when you’re young, you want to believe you’re the one who is doing something that is going to make people believe things or affect their lives, or that you’re going to bring people together, but, you know, we’re like little drops in the bucket. I think it’s all good, because a lot of drops fill up the bucket, I guess. But I certainly don’t overthink or overstate whatever I put out into the world. I’m glad I didn’t put out anything that I’m ashamed of or feel that I cheapened myself or other humans. That’s about the most you can hope for, really. You can maybe minimize the downside, but I don’t know if you can maximize the upside.

  PAUL PROVENZA: As you’ve said, “I always want my comedy to be embracing of our species rather than debasing of it.”

  LILY TOMLIN: I definitely do. That’s why I think so many men don’t think women are funny. They have a different sensibility, basically.

  Or really, I should say that very often that’s the case, but not entirely. I’ve noticed that in movies like Juno, or in Superbad, the Judd Apatow movie, that they’ve introduced a certain kind of tenderness into movies that they never would’ve taken a chance like that with before.

  They’re funny and ribald and all that kind of stuff is going on, but then a kind of tenderness shows, a shade of it that I think is kind of lovely. It’s not heavy-handed or anything, it just kind of gets a little tender—which you don’t expect in that kind of a movie.

  Of course the tenderness is very often between the guys, and that’s okay. In Superbad, when they’re going off with girls, it’s a point of passage, but they look kind of longingly at each other, in that kind of “buddy” way. They tell each other they love each other, you know?

  With movies like that, on the surface you think, “This is going to be a boys’ movie,” but they actually seem more thoughtful, more textured than you’d expect. They’re not just showing all the obvious fronts or posturing. They’re finding some kind of loving impulse. They’re finding the humanity.

  JUDD APATOW

  THOUGH HE FELT unable to find his own unique voice and persona as a stand-up, Judd Apatow’s outsized comic gifts and originality were immediately apparent, and earned him the respect of some of comedy’s biggest names. A gifted writer, he moved easily into writing and producing television, yielding cult hits The Ben Stiller Show, The Larry Sanders Show, The Critic, Freaks and Geeks, and Undeclared. He transitioned deftly into features, producing The Cable Guy and Anchorman before breaking out as a writer/director with the sleeper hit The 40 Year Old Virgin and becoming the most in-demand—and profitable—comedy guru in Hollywood. Subsequent producing and/or directing efforts Superbad, Pineapple Express, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, and Knocked Up cemented that position, and Apatow has raised the bar for exploring heartfelt, touching human experience through sometimes profane, always smart comedy.

  JUDD APATOW: Even my wife says, “What’s with you and the bro-mances? What’s the deal on all the man-love?”

  I’d never really looked at it that way, but something affects what you respond to, I suppose. Steve Carell said, “I want to make a movie about a forty-year-old man who’s a virgin,” and instantly I think, “It’s the greatest idea ever!” Maybe it’s because of who I am and what I’ve been through in relationships that I connect to that loneliness or need or terror that makes that a funny idea to me.

  For me, the emotion is the reason to do the comedy, it’s not tacked on to make the jokes hold together. It’s the part I’m most interested in. If you care about something, if what you’re saying is genuine to you, it’s much easier to be funny with it.

  When I wrote for Larry Sanders, Garry Shandling always talked about “writing from your core.” Whenever we got stuck, before we’d work on any jokes, he’d say, “What would really happen? What would the truth in this moment be?” He said, “The Larry Sanders Show is about people who love each other, but show business gets in the way. All stories are about people who love each other but something’s getting in the way. It’s always about something blocking love.” It never would’ve occurred to me that that’s what Larry Sanders was about, but it made perfect sense. I realized, “Yeah, Larry loves Hank, but Hank really wants to host the show himself. Larry’s ego needs him to be number one, but Hank’s getting in the way so Larry’s afraid of him…” It’s all those permutations.

  That idea changed the way I looked at all stories.

  PAUL PROVENZA: All your movies are very much “guy” stories, but they’re not afraid to wear their hearts on their sleeves.

  JUDD APATOW: I think it’s fun when men open up. That’s why in Knocked Up, they take mushrooms so they can say what they’re really thinking—which I did once; I was on mushrooms on a first date with this woman and after she rejected me, for three straight hours I just asked her why.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Two women opening up to each other isn’t as comedically interesting to me, because women tend to do that naturally. But guys trying to be open and vulnerable while trying to be macho and strong at the same time is pure comic fodder.

  JUDD APATOW: I think a lot of that’s just being uncomfortable being a man and the struggle to “own” your masculinity and cockiness as part of all that. I’ve always found that funny. The goofy guy trying to figure out how to be confident is one of the funniest things of all to me.

  I also think there’s an interesting dynamic of women “straightening out” men or trying to manipulate them into being something different. That struggle is always human, and really good for comedy.

  PAUL PROVENZA: And they’re usually both right and both wrong—that’s what’s really funny.

  JUDD APATOW: I learned slowly over the years that I’m wrong about most everything. In every fight, there’s that struggle to accept the fact that you’re wrong about something and how hard you’ll hold on to being right.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Your movies all say a lot about the male-female dynamic, evolution into manhood, and our assumptions about all that sort of stuff, I think. But they’re not always appreciated for that, are they?

  JUDD APATOW: People see the movies through their subjective eyes. Some critics said they’re sexist, but to me the whole point is that there’s no way the guys could be worse with their behavior; it’s about their struggle to grow up, to be able to handle a family and kids and whatever. With something like Seth saving his bong during an earthquake before thinking about his pregnant girlfriend, I’m trying to show the worst side of a man.

  And I should also be able to show the worst side of a woman, which sometimes is being pregnant and hormonal and kicking your boyfriend out of the car in the middle of a major intersection. You go into nesting mode, your hormones are kicking in, you’re in a panic trying to hold it all together, and once in a while it just blows—at the man you’re with, or at someone you bump into walking down the street. That is very real, very human, and also very funny.

  In Knocked Up, I tried to show a really unpleasant relationship; two people that don’t really work well together. I always thought, “These two might not last three weeks after this movie ends.” It doesn’t even imply they’ll be together forever, but I like that they’re saying, “We screwed up and got pregnant, but we owe it to the baby to at least find out if we could like each other. It’d be wrong to not find out.” That’s
the point of the movie: they don’t just blow each other off. It’s an original premise, because people don’t do that. People usually just head out of town.

  And some people say, “Oh come on, a woman like that would never go for him.”

  Well, a goofy Jewish guy being with a gorgeous woman is not all that crazy. If you need proof, Google Image me and my wife. Look at my wife, then look at me.

  PAUL PROVENZA: I love that Knocked Up ends bittersweet. It evokes The Graduate with that looming sense of, “Now what?” at the end.

  JUDD APATOW: I hope people think it’s open-ended. It’s not exactly The Graduate with them staring at each other on the bus, but it would be illogical to think it’s not going to be a very problematic relationship. In fact, an inspiration for Knocked Up was David Denby’s review of 40 Year Old Virgin. He wrote that Steve Carell’s relationship with Catherine Keener would be very difficult, but that it would clearly be worth it. I thought, “That’s what I want to write more about, people working hard to make their relationships work.”

  Because no two people get along perfectly.

  PAUL PROVENZA: So it’s the journey that’s more interesting than the actual outcome of whether they’re together or not together. These kinds of subtexts and underlying themes aren’t usual fare in younger-skewing, box-office-hit comedies.

  JUDD APATOW: What I’ve done is brought a little bit of a television comedy aesthetic to it. I often see a movie and think, “I liked it, but really…That could have been a lot funnier.”

  I always ask myself, “How can I make it as real as possible and be about all these bigger things and also be super-funny?”

  PAUL PROVENZA: I walked out of Pineapple Express—a very funny movie—thinking, “I don’t know whether this is a pro-pot or anti-pot movie.”

  JUDD APATOW: That movie started because I watched True Romance, and Brad Pitt played this guy who was high in one scene, but he was so funny I wished they were chasing his character instead of Christian Slater, because it must be really hard to run away when you’re that high. And I thought, “How great would it be to do a Cheech & Chong movie but with Jerry Bruckheimer–level action?” A big action movie, but they are just high out of their minds.

  I had read Superbad, but couldn’t get anybody to make it, so I thought, “If Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg wrote this stoner/action-movie idea, maybe that’s more commercial.” I don’t know why we thought the pot movie could be more commercial than the liquor movie, but Superbad ended up happening, and in the middle of shooting that, the studio said, “Since the alcohol movie seems to be going well, maybe we should make that pot movie too.”

  Now, Seth and Evan always said, “Superbad is the kind of movie we wish someone would make. It’s the way we talk, the kind of comedy we like, the kind of action we like,” so it’s been like hooking into two people with this unique perspective as young guys; how they look at the world and what they want to see. I can talk to them, like, “You have these friends in Superbad, but other than trying to get liquor, what’s the movie about?”

  I said to them, “It’s really about two guys that love each other and are about to separate probably for the rest of their lives, and they’re heartbroken and mad that they can’t stay together.” That’s the engine of Superbad.

  With Pineapple Express, we kept saying, “What is this about underneath all this action and comedy and this tone?”

  PAUL PROVENZA: Is it about class division? Self-delusion? Alternative realities?

  JUDD APATOW: Our friend Ian Roberts from Upright Citizens Brigade did the table reading and said, “My favorite thing is that it’s a story about a guy trying to figure out if he’s really friends with his drug dealer or if he’s just his drug dealer.”

  And that was kind of in there, but suddenly that became the story that motored the whole movie: “Am I really friends with this guy?”

  But it’s about Seth’s character, who smokes pot, thinks it’s okay to smoke pot, doesn’t think it’s dangerous, doesn’t think there’s any collateral damage, but he looks down on the guy who sells it to him. He slowly realizes smoking pot causes so much damage to him—and to other people by supporting, like, a whole crime industry.

  I kinda wanted to say there are probably as many people getting killed from pot dealers as from coke dealers. Seth and I had an ongoing debate while making the movie; Seth always said it was not an anti-pot movie; I always said it was: “He smokes pot, has a terrible job, dates a high school girl, for the whole movie the dealer’s trying to kill him, then at the end he realizes, ‘Maybe I shouldn’t live this way.’”

  Seth said, “Nah, he’ll probably just keep smoking pot.”

  So you can see it and think it shows the joys of smoking pot, but…all I know is he gets his ear blown off, almost dies, and basically gets about twenty other people killed—so you’d kinda hope that the next day he wouldn’t run straight to the pot dealer.

  But that’s for people to debate.

  PAUL PROVENZA: For me, it’s easy to sidestep all of that and turn it into an anti-War-on-Drugs movie either way, since if it was legal, none of that would’ve happened. But that’s the way I see things a lot. But again, rarely do you get a movie with such over-the-top action and huge comedy set pieces but you can actually debate the ending or what it all means.

  JUDD APATOW: My daughters are twelve and seven, and I think a lot about what they’re going to make of my movies. Will they think they’re unethical? That I’m promoting pot use? What I tell my twelve-year-old is that I find idiots to be really funny. That’s why they curse in my movies or smoke pot all the time: because they’re a mess, and it’s funny to watch people who are a mess try to get it together.

  What’s funny is some conservative Web site had Knocked Up and Superbad on their list of top ten movies. They said, one says, “Don’t have an abortion,” and the other says, “Don’t have sex before marriage.” Neither is specifically what we intended to say, but…Beneath it all, hopefully, is something positive to think about.

  At the end of the day, I want to get my thoughts across and give the crowd a great time. Those things can work together.

  PAUL PROVENZA: The Graduate and Ground-hog Day are two films that really clarified for me that balance between broad comedy and genuine introspection in comedy.

  JUDD APATOW: Tootsie is a big one for me. Couldn’t be more enjoyable. Then there are movies that are meant to make you uncomfortable or leave you unsettled—like Cassavetes movies. I’m always trying to think how I can slip a little of that kind of thing into my movies.

  I love Borat and movies that are deeply uncomfortable—which is ironic, because when I was a kid, The Honeymooners made me so uncomfortable I’d shut it off when things started going badly for Ralph. I’ve only seen the first twelve minutes of every episode.

  PAUL PROVENZA: My parents couldn’t stand The Honeymooners. They said, “There’s enough screaming and yelling in this house, we don’t need to watch it on TV, too.”

  JUDD APATOW: When we were making Freaks and Geeks, NBC said, “Why can’t they ever win?” They tried to turn it into a wish-fulfillment show like they were used to making.

  We said, “The whole point is they don’t ever win—but they have each other. They may win in the end, but not right now.”

  I had a sense of that myself as this funny kid, bad at sports, reading comic books and writing reports on the Marx Brothers—not for school, just for myself. I used to think, “One day, these things will be cool.”

  When I moved to L.A. at seventeen, I started hanging out at the comedy clubs. I felt like that “bee girl” in Blind Melon’s “No Rain” video, walking through the field and finding all these other people dressed like bees. I couldn’t believe there were that many people with the same interests as me. I felt alone in high school; nobody else cared about comedy or was obsessed with Bill Murray or Monty Python or any of that. It was a great feeling to be in the comedy world, where suddenly, “Oh, I’m not that weird? People value that I k
now minutia about John Candy?”

  PAUL PROVENZA: What other film comedies influenced what you do now?

  JUDD APATOW: Hal Ashby’s a filmmaker I often look toward. In a short span of time he made Shampoo, Coming Home, Being There, Harold and Maude—it’s pretty remarkable. The Last Detail is one of my favorites. Very little happens, but it’s so dense and rich. It’s very powerful and funny.

  Being There is the bar. That’s the kind of movie you look at and think, “I’ll never get there. I’ll spend my whole life trying, but I don’t think I’m going to get there in terms of originality, meaning, comedy, performance…It’s just unique, and one of the most hilarious movies ever made.

  And, obviously, The Graduate was a gigantic influence. On all of us.

  MIKE NICHOLS

  AFTER A FORTY-YEAR Oscar-and Tony Award–winning career directing movies like The Graduate and musical extravaganzas like Monty Python’s Spamalot, it’s easy to forget that Mike Nichols was a groundbreaking comedy performer, too. In partnership with Elaine May, he helped propel the Chicago improv movement, created best-selling comedy albums, and took their act to Broadway. Here, the “veteran” multi-hyphenate holds forth on the thing that inspires you to start doing comedy, and the only other thing that can sustain you if you want to survive.

  MIKE NICHOLS: The Graduate was really about a very specific thing: it was about what happens to your life. It was about drowning in objects, becoming an object—and saving yourself through passion. Madness and passion. That’s why the sense of Ben and Elaine’s liberation at the end, fighting to be free, brought such joy.