E-mail a friendJudd Apatow
original airdate May 8, 2007
Known for crafting original and clever TV shows, Judd Apatow has earned critical acclaim, an Emmy and a loyal cult following. He began his career as a stand-up comic, but eventually made a name for himself behind the camera, with credits that include HBO's long-running The Larry Sanders Show, The Ben Stiller Show and Freaks and Geeks. Apatow segued into features, with projects such as Knocked Up, The Cable Guy, Fun With Dick and Jane and The 40 Year Old Virgin—his big screen directorial debut.
Judd Apatow
Tavis: Judd Apatow's one of Hollywood's most sought-after comedy writers and directors whose film credits include "Talladega Nights," "The 40 Year Old Virgin," and "Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy." His work on television includes award-winning series like "The Larry Sanders Show," "Freaks and Geeks," and "The Ben Stiller Show."
His latest project is the new comedy "Knocked Up," which stars Katherine Heigl from "Grey's Anatomy." The movie opens nationwide June 1st. Here now, a scene from "Knocked Up."
[Clip]
Tavis: So when Judd walks out on the set, he takes a seat and he says, "Let's get this thing started. This may very well be the best interview you have ever done, Tavis." And (laughter) I laughed, but that may very well be the case, 'cause of late you are on a roll, man. I'm gonna start calling you butter, 'cause you on a roll.
Judd Apatow: Let me tell you, if I'm not better than Richard Riordan was, I'm going to feel bad. (Laughter) I'm pretty sure. I'm going to be better than Robert Wagner'll be tomorrow.
Tavis: (Laughs.) I'm gonna tell Mr. Wagner you said that.
Apatow: You tell him that. I'm calling him out. (Laughter)
Tavis: Tell me what does make your stuff work, and let me tell you why I ask that. I was on a plane - I was telling our producer, Holly - I was on a plane one night, sitting next to Will Ferrell. And because of the talk show host in me, I want to just lean over and we're cordial with each other.
Apatow: I'm sure he loved that, too.
Tavis: I'm sure he did.
Apatow: He didn't want to sleep at all. (Laughter)
Tavis: I wanted to lean over and just ask him, from his own perspective, what makes your stuff work. Because while obviously you have a lot of fans, and these movies make a ton of money - and for folk who don't get it, they really don't get why your brand of humor works. Why does it work?
Apatow: Why does it work, or why don't they get it?
Tavis: Okay, two questions.
Apatow: What's the matter with them? Let's talk about them for a few minutes.
Tavis: Take whichever one you wanna take. (Laughter)
Apatow: Why does it work? I can't even think about it too much. I just try to think of things that amuse me and my friends, and then at some point we bring in, like, 300 people, and if they laugh with us, we're like oh, more people like it. And then slowly, it becomes the movie. I'm trying to be honest about my life experience, and so it's kind of some of my experience is through a funhouse mirror.
If I said it was my experiences, I'd get in trouble at home. But it's fabricated versions of things that have happened to me and my wife and Paul Rudd and the actors, and different people that we know. And hopefully, it's relatable to people and that's what people like about it. They see themselves in it.
Tavis: Tell me about "Knocked Up" specifically.
Apatow: Well, "Knocked Up" is inspired by some just bad experiences my wife and I had with gynecologists. Every time a baby would be born, we would have some hellish experience, and I kept saying, "If we don't make this into a movie, this has been a complete waste of our nights, other than having the child."
Tavis: I'm glad you added that in there.
Apatow: That was the best part of the nights.
Tavis: I'm glad you threw that in, yeah.
Apatow: We're always under the impression that, like, the birth experience should be something that's wonderful and that you cherish the rest of your life, and usually, the whole night is a nightmare and then the wonderful part at the end. But it's about a person who gets someone pregnant on a first date, which I thought was funny because it's a forced relationship.
Tavis: It ain't funny if you've been on a first date and somebody called you two days later and said, "I'm pregnant." Not speaking, of course, from personal experience or anything, just -
Apatow: Exactly. It's funny to the viewer. And so I thought, well, what's the worst, most pressurized situation you could ever be in, is getting someone pregnant, and then it really becomes about two people trying to figure out if they ever could like each other. And at first it seems like they wouldn't because he kind of has a semi-pornographic website and smokes a lot of marijuana, and he seems like the nightmare guy to get you pregnant. And slowly, you realize that below that is a good person waiting to come out.
Tavis: You mentioned your wife and kids a moment ago. You have, like, a history here of involving your wife and kids in your projects.
Apatow: Yes, yes. Well, my wife is Leslie Mann, who's hilarious, and she was the drunk driver in "The 40 Year Old Virgin." She vomited on Steve Carell. Has anyone ever said that on your show before?
Tavis: Never.
Apatow: Talked about that?
Tavis: You're the first.
Apatow: I know Riordan didn't.
Tavis: You're the first. Did I read somewhere that your daughter, like, had a role in helping you write that particular scene?
Apatow: Yeah, everything always goes through the mill at the house with everyone, so I'm always asking my wife if she thinks things are funny, and she pitches in terrible things I've done to put in the script. (Laughter) She's always, like, "Do that thing that's really annoying that you do, put that in there." And so my daughter overheard us talking about this driving sequence, this drunk driving sequence, and she was eight.
And she said, "You should fall asleep in the middle, and then fart." And so we're, like, of course we knew that was a good idea. You know that's a good idea. I don't have to tell you. You know that's a good idea.
Tavis: Good idea (laughs).
Apatow: And then we shot it, and in the movie she falls asleep and then she wakes up, but she doesn't far. 'Cause I know the line. I know the line. Don't worry about that. I know where it is. (Laughter) And then I showed it to my daughter 'cause I thought she'd be proud that her joke got in the movie, that Leslie had fallen asleep while driving.
And I said, "Isn't that great?" And she goes, "Yeah, but she didn't fart." So she's a born comedy writer. She's already mad at me for not getting all of her joke pitches in the movie.
Tavis: How did you get started?
Apatow: How did I get started? Well, I wanted to be a stand-up comedian when I was in high school. And so I got a job -
Tavis: Oh, speaking of - not to cut you off - you gotta tell me, as a part of the answer, the story about the radio show you hosted interviewing these comedians.
Apatow: Well, what I did was I wanted to be a stand-up comedian and I didn't know how to do it. I didn't know how to find out how to do it. So the first thing I did was get a job as a dishwasher at a comedy club, just so I could watch. And it was really far away, and I'd have to take a cab there, and everything I made went to the cab to get to work. But for a year, I could watch Eddie Murphy and Rosie O'Donnell when they were first starting out in the eighties. And then -
Tavis: Wait, wait, hold the phone. How is a dishwasher watching the show?
Apatow: He's not doing a good job. He's not on top of it.
Tavis: I'm getting ready to say, isn't, like, the kitchen over there somewhere, the stage is, like, over there somewhere?
Apatow: Well, at some point, I made a switch. I realized, busboy.
Tavis: Oh.
Apatow: That was the big change.
Tavis: Okay (laughs).
Apatow: And then I was like, "Well, now I want to talk to them. How can I talk to them?" And my high school had a radio station. So I created a radio show, which was me interviewing comedians, only as an excuse to talk to them, not 'cause I cared about the radio station, which was a great radio station - WKWZ, for those of you on Long Island, New York.
You can drive into the parking lot of the school and see if you can hear the signal. It's not a strong signal. (Laughter) But it was a great place where this teacher, Jack DeMacy, told us that we could do anything that we wanted to do. And so I decided to do that, and I would just call up people's publicists and say, "I'm the host of a radio show."
I didn't say I was five years old. But I was 16, 15, and so next thing you know, I interviewed Steve Allen and Howard Stern and John Candy and Garry Shandling and Seinfeld and Leno, and all kind of - a lot of them earlier in their careers. Not Steve Allen. He was 100 then. (Laughter) But everybody else was young. And slowly, it became a way to really understand the process of being a writer and a comedian.
Tavis: Your journey is fascinating to me, and I wanted you to tell that story. And nobody I've ever talked to or interviewed or conversed with on this show has taken the same route to success, obviously - certainly not in comedy. Everybody has a different route to go. In your mind, and given your experience, how does one become a comedy - is there a prerequisite to being a comedy writer? Do you have to even be funny to be a comedy - how do you do that?
Apatow: First, childhood beatings is important.
Tavis: Yeah, I got that covered.
Apatow: From friends or family, either can work.
Tavis: Okay.
Apatow: Well, usually it's a skewed point of view. Not a lot of incredibly attractive people doing comedy. People always say, like, "Can't you get an attractive person?" Like, they're not funny. I'm of the Jack Klugman school. (Laughter) But if you watch and you learn how to write - and it is a lot of work. The best stand-up comedians, they sit down every day at a desk and will write jokes like it's a job.
And I noticed that, that people like Jerry Seinfeld and this comedian Larry Miller, they would go home and literally write all day long, and at night they would try out their jokes. So there's a real work ethic involved. And you have to be mentally messed up in a big way. Which is helpful. (Laughter) It's helped me a little bit.
Tavis: So what's it feel like right now to be, like, the - you are, like, the man on the comedy scene.
Apatow: I only realized that -
Tavis: For movies in L.A. right now.
Apatow: I only realized it -
Tavis: You saw that "USA Today" profile, come on.
Apatow: I just saw your intro on the teleprompter and that was the moment that it crystallized.
Tavis: Yeah, get out of here, everybody - (laughter).
Apatow: I said, "I am on Tavis Smiley right now."
Tavis: Yeah, you really are funny, you got jokes. Judd's got jokes. But seriously, you are, like, the man now on the comedy scene in Hollywood. You handling that okay?
Apatow: If I started crying now, it would be awkward, wouldn't it? (Laughter)
Tavis: It'd be great television.
Apatow: It would be great if I just went to a dark place?
Tavis: They'd call me the Black male Barbara Walters.
Apatow: (Laughs.) I might crack in front of you. How - well, it's an interesting moment, because I worked for a long time and people didn't watch what I did. I did a lot of TV shows that were canceled very quickly. I did this show "The Ben Stiller Show," a sketch show in the early nineties, and then I did a show called "Freaks and Geeks" and "Undeclared," and they were all canceled quickly.
So I certainly have gone through a lot of times where I liked the work, but I couldn't get anyone to see it. So this is a great moment because hopefully, the work has always been pretty good, but people, for whatever reason, it's clicked into the culture somehow and it's really fun. It's just fun that people laugh, and you show the movie and you wonder if they're going to be horrified or applaud, and they get it. So it's exciting.
Tavis: What do you learn, to your point now, Judd, what do you learn from those cancellations, those down times, that motivates you to keep moving to get to this point where you are the man on the comedy scene for movies versus saying, “You know what? I wasn't obviously cut out to do this”?
Apatow: Well, the main thing that I learned was that I shouldn't give in when people had notes that I disagreed with. A lot of the reason why those shows went away is 'cause people disagreed with what we wanted them to do. And that would end our experience earlier, because they knew the show wasn't going to morph. I wasn't going to put on 11 more hot ladies to keep it on the air, if you know what I'm saying.
Tavis: What do you got against hot ladies?
Apatow: Well, I enjoy the hot ladies, but - like everyone does, and all your viewers do, but I didn't want to change what I was doing. And I never did change anything, because I always thought "It's gonna be on DVD, it's gonna be on cable, and if I sell it out, I'll always feel bad about it." So I've tried to do that and slowly, people started liking what we were doing in bigger numbers. So I'm proud of the fact that I didn't chuck out my own opinions and just put in the eye candy.
Tavis: Well, whatever he's doing is working, and working awfully well. The new film from Judd Apatow is called "Knocked Up," June 1st at a theater near you, as if you haven't seen the billboards and promos everywhere, anyway. Judd wants me to beg you to go and check this out. He needs the money.
Apatow: Yeah. You're uncomfortable every time you say the phrase "knocked up." You always pause. You go, "His new movie, 'Knocked Up.'"
Tavis: Yeah. I was saying to the staff, those are two words that a single guy does not want to hear, at least not this single guy, any time soon. Nice to have you here.
Apatow: Nice to be here, thank you very much.
Tavis: My pleasure.
Back to May 8, 2007