Judd Apatow Interview
A while back I interviewed one of my heroes of sorts, Judd Apatow ( creator/writer/producer/director for Freaks and Geeks and The 40-Year-Old Virgin ), for WIRED. The story ended up getting killed, and I didn't quite have the time to shop it around anywhere else, so here's the interview... for free!
Judd Apatow Interview
The 40-Year-Old Virgin
July 2005
Ken Taylor: The 40-Year-Old Virgin. Pretty much just cuts to the chase, doesn’t it?
Judd Apatow: People keep saying, “Are you going to change the title?” I’m like, “No, that’s what the movie is!”
KT: But all of your stories have simple titles yet there’s always a deeper meaning. What’s this one really about?
JA: I like to refer to it as the first performance-anxiety comedy of the new century. It’s about a guy who is not unlike you or me. He’s a little bit of a geek but not much. He has action figures; I’ll give him that. He has a video game chair. But he’s basically a guy that let [sex] get past him. … Some of [the film] is about the insanity of dating in the year 2005, and then it becomes about how maintaining a relationship is even more complicated than getting someone to have sex with you. It’s a dirty, sweet movie…like a Freaks and Geeks episode if, 25 years later, one of the geeks still hadn’t had sex.
KT: Well, is losing one’s virginity the ultimate nerd prize?
JA: When I started writing the movie with Steve [Carrell, who plays Andy Stitzer], we had Universal to do some research for us and they found all these messages on message boards and blogs about being a middle-aged virgin and there was an enormous amount of people who were discussing their middle-aged virginity. What I discovered was they were just normal people who were a little bit insecure. They weren’t weird or creepy at all; they were very sweet and just scared enough to not take a risk. And that’s what made Steve and I decide to make him a very normal person. He’s not Pee Wee Herman. He’s Steve. He’s like a soft version of what Steve Carrell is like in real life.
KT: Do you think there’s a general fear of this happening? Was it for you?
JA: I was almost more terrified of having sex than not having sex. That’s what [Freak and Geeks creator] Paul Feig and I always talked about, that television and films never addressed the fact that kids run away from intimacy. They always showed the kids who were just dying to have sex with each other. But the kids we knew were terrified of kissing with their tongues and whatnot. So that wasn’t a fear of mine.
KT: What was high school like for you?
JA: I grew up right when technology was taking off. I was the first kid in my neighborhood to have an Atari. I remember when MTV was launched and it came on my TV. Just one day it was just there! I watched a ton of TV as a kid. There were years when I was watching TV from three in the afternoon to 12:30 at night. … My parents got divorced and as they went through this horrible divorce I just went into my room and played records by the Who and watched Mike Douglas and Merv Griffin. I loved comedians, probably because they screamed about injustice in the world and maybe I was mad about my parents getting divorced so I just liked angry funny people who said so-and-so was bullshit. So I became obsessed with SNL; people like Steve Martin, Richard Pryor, Monty Python. I couldn’t get enough of it and I wanted to be a part of that world. I would highlight my TV Guide.
KT: How have geeks changed over the years? Have they changed, or has their perception just changed?
JA: It’s changed a lot because many of the leaders of our society are geeks. When I was growing up there wasn’t a Bill Gates to look up to and say, “Oh yeah, maybe I’ll turn into Bill Gates.” We had Horshack.
KT: So from what did you draw your inspiration when you were young?
JA: I was very resigned to the fact that nobody would understand that I was cool. I was into comics and obsessed with the Marx Brothers. I used to think to myself, “You know, I’m very cool but no one seems to understand this, but one day I will meet a woman who gets all that I have going,” and it only took another 15 or 20 years for that to happen. I never thought I wasn’t cool and that’s what me and Paul Feig talked about a lot when we were doing Freaks and Geeks is that the geeks know they’re cool. It’s not that they’re not cool; it’s just that people are valuing things like athleticism more than their odd gifts. There are a lot more positive portrayals of smart people and weird people now and it’s looked up to a lot more then it used to be. My entire career has been based on portraying these types of people and I always try to write about an underdog….
KT: But your underdogs don’t necessarily win, and I’m curious as to why, aside from in the film Heavyweights, your geeks never prevail. You’ve won. Why don’t they?
JA: When we did the Larry Sanders Show it was really fun to end episodes on bad notes. The story would end right at the moment when something went horribly wrong. So when we were doing Freaks and Geeks, the pilot ends on a positive note, but as we went to series it became fun to have stories end on a horrible note, but it’s never truly a horrible note because the geeks are always left with each other. They have these friends and they’re never going to go away. So I always say this is about the lessons you learn from taking your hard knocks... We’d do an episode where they’d make friends with the new girl who had just come to town, and they know that as soon as the pretty girl meets the other people in school that she’ll start hanging out with the popular kids. So there’s this ticking clock on their friendship and as you watch the episode you assume that the girl will realize that they’re cool and not blow them off. What we decided was that no, at the end of the episode she should blow them off. They knew it was coming and they enjoyed her while they had her. It was realistic, and very painful and maybe why the show isn’t on the air anymore but it’s a more interesting story to tell.
KT: But Freaks and Geeks has done well in the DVD aftermarket, and so will shows like Arrested Development. Is TV just stupid?
JA: I think that what’s happening on television is that there’s a lot more niche programming on cable so the networks have decided that they are the big tent that must include everybody and that they’re not doing things that are as challenging as they used to be. Even the shows that are smart and interesting seem to survive because there are gorgeous people on them, and that’s how those show runners, who are amazing, trick the networks into letting them tell these more complicated stories. I used to always joke that the next show I was going to do was an incredibly smart, insightful show about hot ladies. And that’s what happens on television. Some people really enjoy realistic, honest, painful, dark comedy, and some people want to escape. They want to see a crime and see it get solved and believe that the world works that way. I’m like that. I’m a reality show freak. I don’t care how bad it is, I’m amused by all of it. But some of my work has forced people to relive things that they didn’t enjoy the first time around.
posted by Ken Taylor at 4:03 PM
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