For the last few years he’s been making great stuff but now, thankfully, more people are starting to pay attention and he’s able to do even more. In August we’ll be getting “Superbad” (which he produced) and then next year we’re getting “The Pineapple Express” and “Walk Hard” – other projects he either produced or wrote and I couldn’t be happier.
I think Judd’s a comedic genius and one whose work I always love. And I’m happy to write that “Knocked Up” is another home-run. Once again Judd has crafted a story that’s based on something very real – what happens when a one night stand leads to an unplanned pregnancy. But while some directors might play it straight, Judd weaves in tons of comedy while still telling a serious story.
To help promote the film Judd and most of the cast recently did some interviews and I’ll be posting them today and tomorrow. But before you get to the interview I was just told that the “Knocked Up” website has been updated with restrictedclips and deleted scenes so you might want to check them out. You'll also get abehind-the-sceneslook at the making of thefilm.
This interview was done a few days ago and it was conducted as a press conference with a number of journalists attending. If you’d like to listen to the interview you can click here to download the MP3, otherwise you can read a transcript below.
“Knocked Up” gets released on June 1st.
Judd: We knew we could make the third ‘Spider-Man’ better than the first. It’s all about the technology catching up with our ideas.
Question: Judd, when we visited you on the set you asked us not to write about any celebrity references. How did you clear those likenesses?
Judd: Well, I don’t have to clear their names to poke fun, but so many people are desecrated during the shoot when people are improvising that I never want it to be in the paper, because it’s so unfair to all of them. And we really think a lot about who we are joking about and why. We hope the spirit of it is not unkind. So, Matthew Fox – there is obviously nothing wrong with Matthew Fox at all, but it’s just funny for a goofy guy to have an issue with Matthew Fox because he’s so handsome and successful. He’s the first guy you would go, ‘I don’t like that Matthew Fox guy!’ And it’s funny that he doesn’t like Steely Dan, because a young guy that age who is into Wu-Tang Clan would not like Steely Dan. I love Steely Dan! I couldn’t like it more! My wife is about to kill me how much I put Steely Dan on. So, I’ll put on ‘Katy Lied’ on and just loop it. But, it’s all in good fun and hopefully no one takes offense for it. I would! But, I obviously don’t. They slammed me on ‘The Simpsons’ once and I still feel it.
Can you talk about the Jew power on this movie?
We are like the Spice Girls of Jews. That’s how I look at. I didn’t set out to make the movie too Jew-centric, to create a word for this conversation. But Seth is a Jewish guy and all his friends are Jewish, at least the ones I cast in the movie, so I thought it’d be funny that they talk about it, because it’s truthful to their experience. I didn’t set out to make any kind of statement like ‘You can have five Jews in a movie.’ I think we saw that can be done in ‘The
Are you a big fan of MrSkin.com in real life?
I had never been to MrSkin.com, but I had heard the guy on Howard Stern a lot. Are you from MrSkin.com? Who is the guy who is always on Howard Stern? James McBride. Oh, that’s James McBride! That’s hysterical. I just got him tickets for the premiere, but they didn’t tell me it was the MrSkin guy. (Laughs.) So, I hadn’t been to the site. I still haven’t to the site, although I now have a password, but I was trying to think of a funny job that would make a woman uncomfortable thought something in the semi-pornographic industry would be a job that would make her feel weird about that guy impregnating her. Just the way if James McBride would impregnated a woman she’d be uncomfortable with his profession, but not his cash. So, we thought it would be funny to create a website someone had already created and they didn’t realize it was never going to work. And that would be part of his downfall.
Was there any ever boundaries? And I know you chose to show the crown twice…
No! Three times. You blacked one out. It’s three different angles.
That was my first question. And secondly, I don’t think the word abortion ever comes up in this.
The world smushmortion comes up.
Was that to keep it funny and not be serious?
Well, I think it’s obviously an important aspect of the movie – is will she keep the baby and the decision whether or not to keep the baby. And from the very beginning we knew we wanted to have a moment where Seth and his idiotic stone friends debate abortion. And we actually improvised for five hours, these guys debating the issue. Some of it you will see on the DVD. And it’s very, very funny, but really shocking and disturbing. It may have killed Jerry Falwell. (Laughs.) It may be, I think that that he knew it was out there and he just could not handle. But it is part of the movie, because the movie is about two people trying to decide how they are going to handle the fact that a baby is coming. And the first decision you make is, ‘Am I going to keep the baby?’ And part of what is interesting to me is that it’s two people trying to do the right thing and keep the baby. And they are trying to decide if they ever could like each other which is probably something most people don’t do and that’s what hopefully makes it an original concept. I am pro chose and I don’t think anyone should tell anyone else what to do with their bodies or their points of view. I think those decisions are very personal and no one has the answer, so I am pretty solid in that position. But, I also think it’s a very interesting story when you decide not to get an abortion. And I am also kind of surprised that it’s shocking to people that they don’t get an abortion because some people say, ‘Wouldn’t they just get an abortion?’ Is it so weird that in this day and age that people are uncomfortable doing that? So, everyone has their own take on it and subjective view on it. And in terms of the comedy in terms of what I’ll show or what I won’t show, I just want it to seem reaI. So the reason that I show the crowning shot is if I don’t If I don’t show it I just look like an episode of ‘Friends’ and I am trying to make you feel the pain of that that experience, because it is the most intense moment in people’s lives and I had to do something that hadn’t been done before. My original goal was to find a woman who would allow me to shoot the baby coming out and then match it into Catherine – the same sheets, the same bed. And we got close to getting it done, but here’s why we weren’t allowed to. And this is interesting. The state of
They called me and said, ‘We love it!’ (Laughs.) No, I think it’s fine. They show it on the Discovery channel five times a day on ‘A Babies Story’ which every time I see my wife watching, I know it means she wants to get pregnant.
The scene in the waiting room where the babies are freaking Seth out. What is the background on that?
Well I just filled a room with babies and just positioned them in the room. Some are the babies of crewmembers and some are babies that are baby actors. There is a whole world of baby actors that you don’t know about. If I needed a baby this afternoon, I could get a baby if I had the money to act with. There are some very nice people who have twins and if one is crying then you bring in the other one. We are always very careful with them, because at some level it’s odd there is a baby there and it feels wrong. So, we try to shoot them very quickly and then have them leave. Especially when the baby is born and they are handed the baby, it’s difficult, because you want a baby that’s teeny, because it would look weird if a baby came out and was talking. And then you are scared to even have to hold the baby. The guy who delivers the baby, Ken Jeong, is actually a doctor in real life and he was terrified holding this little baby even though he knows how to do it.
Are you keeping the same title in the
That is a very good question. What does ‘Knocked Up’ mean in the
It means to wake up.
To wake up is to get knocked up?
People have come to blows with American tourists.
Really? That’s interesting. No one has told me they are changing it there, although I was told that in certain Spanish language countries it would be called ‘Super Horny. ‘ It changed in different markets, but I think it’s still that in the
Can you compare this directing experience to your first movie?
Well, it’s very scary to direct your first movie, because you understand that every moment that if you do a terrible job and fail they won’t allow you to do it again. So, it’s almost like an audition to have a career. This time I felt like if I screwed it up, I would probably still be allowed to do it again because the movie wasn’t that expensive. But, OK, I can probably have two really terrible big failures that I’m allowed to have before my career is over. So, I felt better about that. I was much more relaxed. I was very nervous during ‘The 40-Year Old Virgin.’ I was constantly trying to hide my terror from the cast and crew. This time I actually enjoyed myself. But that’s also because my family was around and that made it a more fun set.
Can you talk a little bit about the sound track and getting Mr. Wainwright to play a gynecologist?
Sure. Well I first saw Loudon Wainwright on the David Letterman morning show in 1980 or ’81 and he was on a few times and I was fascinated by him. I was probably about 13 years old or 14 years old and he had all these really dark love songs about breaking up and they were hilarious and very sweet and it was the first time I had heard humor in music that was also good music and it really connected with me. So I followed him very closely and as I have been allowed to produce things almost for my own enjoyment because when Loud is around to me it’s like bongos on the set. I just feel like he is an underappreciated genius in music and so I had him on “Undeclared.” Also, he a very funny actor and he’s so loaded with emotion and angst that there’s a lot to tap there. But with this movie, the reason why I had Loudon Wainwright and Joe Henry score it was – what happened was I saw Loudon Wainwright in concert and he had a song called “Gray in L.A.” that I thought was fantastic and he hadn’t recorded it yet and I wanted it in the movie, but my music supervisor Jonathan Karp said, “Ask him to record it without lyrics because it’s so pretty maybe that could be the sound for the whole movie.” And Loudon was in
Can you talk about the upcoming DVD and if you’ve thought about what you might be directing next?
The DVD there’s going to be a one- and a two-disc version released at the same time sometime in the winter time and we just have so many extras that it’s ridiculous. It’s taken so much time to watch them. They’ve literally handed me DVD’s with 6 hours of footage that I have to go through. One thing we did that I think is really funny is we shot a fake documentary during the making of the movie and the documentary is about how Seth Rogan was the tenth choice to play the lead. So during our shoot we would have actors come and perform a scene and then I would fire them. And so we had James Franco do it, Justin Long, David Krumholtz, Allen Covert. I did it. There was a moment where I think I should be the lead as an actor/director.
Have you thought about what you might be doing next?
Well I wrote a movie. We have Superbad coming out August 17th which is a movie that Seth wrote with his partner, Evan Goldberg. It’s a high school comedy and it’s a really hilarious movie that I think is going to be really, really popular at the end of the summer. It’s truly one of the funniest movies I’ve ever been a part of or near. It just works. It stars Jonah Hill who’s in “Knocked Up” and Michael Cera from “Arrested Development” and Seth and Bill Hader play cops in it and it’s just funny. It’s about one insane night in high school, the last week of high school, and Greg Mottola, the director of the Daytrippers, he directed it. And then I just finished a movie that I wrote with Jake Kasdan and Jake directed it and it’s called “Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story” and that is a goof on movies like “Ray” and “Walk the Line” and “Selena” and “Great Balls of Fire” and it’s about the long hard walk of Dewey Cox. He’s been addicted to a lot of drugs. He’s gone through a lot of wives and when he was a kid, he accidentally cut his brother in half with a machete. He’s working out these problems in this movie and we’re very sure it’s going to win an Oscar. We’re pretty sure that it’s a shoe in at this point.
Could you talk a little more about working with Seth? What makes the two of you such a good team and how did your working relationship develop over the years?
Well I met Seth when he was 16 years old and he was in
Just curious, when you were a young man coming up, were there any particular sex comedies that might have rocked your world and made you realize you could make movies like that?
Well I was pretty obsessed with “Annie Hall” when I was younger. I had the videotape of it as soon as videotapes were invented. That was one of the first videotapes my family had. So I put in a lot of hours watching “Annie Hall” and “
Can you talk a little bit about your experiences working with Cirque Du Soleil?
Cirque Du Soleil was fantastic to us. We had this idea. I’d written Cirque Du Soleil into movies before and for one reason or another it never seemed to survive the rewrites and I always knew that there was a great comedy sequence to be done with Cirque Du Soleil and I was frankly very surprised that it hadn’t already been done. There’s very few things that are fresh that are that popular. So when we sent them the pages, they were very, very receptive and they got the joke and were very comfortable with it because it is about guys doing mushrooms at Cirque Du Soleil but it didn’t seem to bother them. They got the joke and we went to all the shows and tried to figure out which show would look right for the sequence and then when we went there, for an entire day they performed the show just for our cameras and about 900 extras and it really couldn’t have been easier. It’s the kind of thing that you would thing would be incredibly difficult to accomplish, but theirs is just such a well run operation that they made it all easy and I’m really proud of the sequence. It gets really big laughs and I’ve been to all of those shows a billion times and we all went to the Love show the weekend that we shot that sequence. I’ve since been back. I’m very thankful to them. Then later I found out that the woman who was in charge of approving everything babysat me when I was 8 years old. Isn’t that odd? She was my babysitter, now she’s head of public relations for Cirque Du Soleil.
Does she remember you?
She did, she did due to my childhood antics. I’m sure I created a lot of problems for her then.