Popstar: Andy Samberg and The Lonely Island Interview

You might know The Lonely Island from their SNL digital shorts, you might know them from the insane and wonderful 2007 film Hot Rod, or you might just know them for getting Justin Timberlake to sing about putting his dick in a box, but after this weekend you'll know them as the guys who wrote, directed and starred in the funniest movie of the summer. With Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping Andy Samberg, Akiva Schaffer and Jorma Taccone take their bonkers goofiness and talent for insanely catchy songs to the next level.

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A mockumentary skewering the absurdity of the entertainment industry, Popstar centers on Samberg's Conner4Real, a Bieber-fashioned music sensation who gets a hard dose of the reality he's lost touch with when his latest album crashes and burns. Backed by co-producer Judd Apatow, the comedic trio gets to go all in on their for the first fully-fledged Lonely Island movie, and it's 90 minutes of pure, ridiculous delight. It's got dick jokes. It's got crazy celebrity cameos. And it's got a song about fucking Bin Laden that will be stuck in your head for weeks.

With Popstar arriving in theaters nationwide this weekend, I recently sat down with Samberg, Taccone, and Schaffer in New York to talk about the musical comedy. We chatted about if the concept came first, delivering a joke a minute, the crazy amount of songs they wrote that didn't make it in the movie, and more. The Lonely Island:

Did the concept come first or the desire to make a movie?
Talk about the insane ratio of jokes in the film.
Was Akiva bummed to spend most of the movie on his own?
Have they caught the bug for feature films?
Talk about "Equal Rights" song, AKA the best thing ever.
How many songs did they write that didn't make it into the movie?

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Image via Universal Pictures[/caption] Here's the official synopsis for Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping.

Universal Pictures’ POPSTAR: NEVER STOP NEVER STOPPING is headlined by musical digital-shorts superstars Andy Samberg, Akiva Schaffer and Jorma Taccone, collectively known as The Lonely Island. The comedy goes behind the scenes as singer/rapper Conner4Real (Samberg) faces a crisis of popularity after his sophomore album flops, leaving his fans, sycophants and rivals all wondering what to do when he’s no longer the dopest star of all.
The latest comedy from blockbuster producer Judd Apatow (Trainwreck, Superbad, Knocked Up) co-stars Sarah Silverman, Tim Meadows and Maya Rudolph and many of the biggest names in comedy and music in cameo performances. Co-directed by Schaffer and Taccone and written by The Lonely Island trio, POPSTAR is also produced by Rodney Rothman (producer of Get Him to the Greek, Forgetting Sarah Marshall; co-writer of 22 Jump Street), as well as Samberg, Schaffer and Taccone.

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