Inside of You with Michael Rosenbaum - JUDD APATOW: Balancing Work & Making Comedy Magic

Episode Date: May 10, 2022

Judd Apatow (Superbad, Knocked Up) joins us this week with endless stories of his experience making comedy magic from being roommates with Adam Sandler and seeing his brilliance before the rest of the world to his directorial/ production experience alongside comedic icons making films with cemented reputations in comedy. Judd talks about the reasoning for having so many projects going at once because of times in the past with some falling through, like Freak and Geeks, or even some taking years and years to get greenlit, like Superbad and Pineapple Express. This description could literally be 1,000 words with how much notable stuff Judd talks about this week… enjoy folks. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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responsibly. You're listening to Inside of You with Michael Rosenbaum. Greetings. Hello, Ryan. Howdy, Michael? Hey, folks. Thanks for tuning in. Thanks for giving the podcast support.

I really appreciate it. If you're here for the first time, listen to some other episodes. Write a review. Tell us what you think. You can follow us on the podcast and keep up to date with what we're doing at InsideEy Podcast on Instagram and Facebook at InsideEapod on Twitter. I really appreciate you choosing this podcast. There's so many other podcasts around,

but you know I get deep. You know, I get real. I keep it real, Ryan. We get deep. We get deep. And we got a great podcast today in just a second. But I just want to share a few things with you. I am going to be in St. Louis this coming weekend to sign autographs.

Tom Welling and I are doing a small little nights. Then I'll be in Liverpool, the weekend of the 21st. I will be June 10th that weekend. I'll be in Illinois, Metropolis, Illinois, metropolis illinois signing autographs doing a small little nights and then i'll be going to australia june 17th through the 27th perth and sydney get your tickets um a lot of fun to be had also uh i want to thank my patrons lovable patrons i always give them a shout out at the end all their names the top tier patrons if you want to support the podcast it means a lot it helps

the podcast substantially go to patreon.com slash inside of you also a big stage of you also a big stage at 2 p.m. and 6 p.m. May 28th. 2 p.m. and 6 p.m. Get your tickets. Go to stage it.com or you can go to sunspin.com. We also have Zooms if you want to get a Zoom. And I'm on the cameo. That's about all I'll say about that. Patreon. You can join Patreon by going to patreon.com slash inside of you and support the podcast. Judd Apatel. Yep. This is one that Ryan was starstruck. It's not often you meet somebody who sort of shaped your comedy brain. that's sort of true i mean yeah he shaped everyone's brain yeah comedy brain he's uh what i love about him is he's the kind of guy that you can direct message into instagram and and say hey i'd love

you to do my podcast and he's like yeah absolutely let's do it couldn't believe it i mean you know i get people that are half the stars he is one-fourth the stars that don't even respond he responded and he came on the podcast and he was so open and funny and giving he said he's sent me a whole bunch of cool stuff to watch to prepare for the interview like the george carlin special that's coming out uh bubble uh yeah the bubble i mean he's just uh he's extraordinary his books uh you're gonna hear about it all without further ado we should just get into it because it's a wonderful wonderful time i have with judd apatel let's get inside of judd appetow it's my point of you you're listening to inside of you with michael rose

Rosenbaum. Inside of you with Michael Rosenbaum was not recorded in front of a live studio audience. Yeah. I mean, the first thing you said is like, oh, you collect shit. I collect shit. And that made me feel good because I've had many people like Bob Odenkirk, Dak, Shepard, guys have come in here as I name drop and they just sort of say, what's wrong with you?

Why do you get autographs? Why do you collect things? What's going on? So wrong. That's so. Bob. It's so Bob. So, like, shit on our joy and our memorabilia.

Bob in his house without one breaking bad, like fake drug packet. Yeah. That's what we would have done. We would took the blue meth. Right. From the set, from the prop people, and framed it. Framed it. That's where it should be.

I have Breaking Bad memorabilia in there, and I wasn't even on the show. Come on. Dax could have had a without a paddle, paddle up on the wall. I'm all for that stuff. I remember Jim Carrey framed some of his outfits from the movies. In his house? He had a movie theater. He still does.

And so he would have the Ace Ventura outfit and the cable guy outfit. And I thought that's the coolest thing ever. I loved it. I'm all for the worship of all that stuff. When I was a kid, obsessed with autographs. So I'm like a kid on Long Island. I just so want to touch showbiz. I don't know how to do it.

And as a little kid, the only thing I could think of was writing letters. And there would be these little books you could get, Homes of the Stars. And they'd show like Lucy's House and Jimmy Stewart's house. And in the back, it would have the address of NBC and ABC. And I would just sit there all day long writing letters to James Garner and Hal Linden. Come on. You did that. You wrote letters to hundreds of.

Hundreds of. And I got tons of weird autographs. I have Gilda Radner's autograph from back then. Jackie Gleason, they're probably all written by secretaries. I figured out later, and that breaks my heart. I doubt it. Come on, you really think so? Who knows?

Gilda seems real. And I love that collection. And I was laughing because there was like a fire scare in our neighborhood a few years ago. And that was one of the first things I grabbed to put in the car when we were evacuating was my autograph collection. from sixth grade. Hey, there's nothing wrong with that. No, it's the best.

What do you have? First of all, your wife, Leslie Mann, who I think is fucking hilarious and hot. Can I say that? I agree. Yeah, but how do you, I mean, does she say no, Judd? We're not putting that in the house.

Oh, she knows. Does she turn things down? Oh, she knows that I'm weird about that stuff. And the funny thing is I know the second I die, it goes in a dumpster. There's no one who will go like, let's go through dad stuff. And I'll hang some of it in my house.

to remember dad it's straight in the burner there's no one who cares about it i can't even get my kids to sit with me once to go do you want to look look at it zero but i have my office and what do you have in there what are your like most like the things that you love the most they're on the wall that your prize possessions what are those well i just switched offices my old office had what you would expect the posters from the movies signed and and photos of everyone we've worked with things like that Then I just moved to new offices. All the walls have nothing on them because I'm like, I guess it's like a new era. And I should let the present moment determine it.

I shouldn't just hang all the freaks and geeks posters like I normally would do. But that's you. But the one thing I did do because I don't know what to hang. I was on eBay and somehow I saw that some guy in Canada spent his whole life taking Polaroids with celebrities and having them sign the Polaroids. And in the pictures, it looks like a guy in his early 60s. And they were 140 of them. It's literally like him with the Smothers Brothers.

And then the next one is Rudy Giuliani. And the next one is some Canadian star and Sean Cassidy. And I bought them. And I'm doing this six foot by six foot frame of this man who I don't know and all of his photos with celebrities. That's just a conversation piece. So maybe that's the way. But that's cool. Yes.

Oh, I think it's the coolest thing ever. But when I tell my family that they give me a look, which shows they don't think that's cool. Really? So Maude and Iris and Leslie, they don't get autographs. They don't care about that stuff. When you go on to a set, by the way, do you, when you work with somebody that you were enamored by or someone you really loved? And I don't know if you feel that way now. I don't know if you get enamored because you've worked with a lot of great people.

But do you still get a little starstruck? He's still like, I got to get this signed eventually, or you don't think like that. I certainly do, I guess it's less people because I feel like as I get older, I feel like we're all trying to do the same thing. So the person that you might have been in awe of when you were young, when you get older like me, you know he's in the same hell as me trying to write the new album or not screw up the new movie. Right.

And you don't feel like they're in another place. You feel like, oh, that's an artistic person trying not to make. make shit. And so whoever it is, it's Mick Jagger, he's like, how do I make another record people will pay attention to? Right. But every once in a while, there'll be someone that really gets you, like I was just talking to somebody about Eminem who was in This is 40.

And that's the kind of person that I get scared around. Really? One, because I'm just so in awe of what he's done. And I'm not in that world. You have nothing in common, you feel? I mean, I probably do have things in common, but just on the surface, my, like, childlike anxiety, I feel intimidated and also just whatever. The attitude of rap. And, you know, it's so different than comedy because it's built on bravado and we're built on, like, being proud to be terrified.

Yes. Like our insecurities. So it's just a different stance. But then he was riotously fun. and improvising and and was a huge fan of Superbad said he watched it a zillion times it could literally recite the movie beginning to end does that just make you feel awesome oh you hear that from these guys oh yeah just the idea of him sitting in his house watching Superbad 30 40 times laughing you know you also think how happy is that guy made me the fact that at some point

he's in his house cracking up at Seth and and Jonah and Bill and Emma and everybody, Martha, and super bad. Right. You know, that's the greatest feeling ever. Yeah. I can't, like, the first thing I thought of when I was going to talk to you was like, and we met doing stand-up. I know you do stand-up a lot.

You've been doing stand-up your whole life, which we can get into. But you're the first person that's given me a homework for the interview. You gave me a lot of stuff, which was, now listen, this was a lot. But it was great. Like I had the time. And no one has seen any of this, which is the funny part. because I realized that I was very productive during the pandemic and I didn't know what that said about me that during this crisis I just went straight to work.

So I finished my book, Sicker in the Head, which is another book of interviews with comedy people. Right. And some, you know, Jeff Tweedy's in it too and Gail King, but it's mainly like Sasha Baron Cohen and Nathan Fielder and Hannah Gadsby and everybody. Yeah. And so I was like, everyone's home. they have to say yes they can't say no i know they're home and i know they're going on and they're

all vulnerable and in a place where they're thinking about things i'm sure you found that during your podcast that people are just much more reflective than they were sure and then i had been working on this george carlin documentary i started it right before the pandemic awesome i let me tell you i i didn't really i'm embarrassed to say but i really it's not that i wasn't a big George Carlin fan. I just wasn't educated on him. And this boy, is this an education of George Carlin, the influence he had, who he was, the hardships he went through when he hit rock bottom and like other comedians were sort of making fun of him at a certain time, you know, when he was doing blow and his wife was an alcoholic and his daughter stuck in the middle all

of this shit. I was like, this is intense as hell and I really learned a lot. I love this document. When does it come out? It's going to come out mid to late May. And I'm really proud of it. In the beginning, I thought, I don't know how we could do something as good as the Gary Shandling documentary, because Gary was so open about his feelings. He really expressed himself in every situation. He was just cut in a vein everywhere. That's what he was looking for. He was looking for the answers, right? Yeah, and he wanted to tell you what he was feeling, and he wanted to go deep, and he wanted to talk about going deep. So when you would look up interviews that he did with people like Kevin Smith or Mark Marin, it was all there. I mean,

There was a great line Gary had in one of the interviews, I think it was with Mark Maren. It might have been Kevin Smith. He said, life is short, but not short enough. And so there was all this stuff. And I thought, well, George Carlin never told us anything about himself. Was it just the period? Was it the sense of like just the time period that he sort of grew up in?

Probably. I mean, it was an era where we didn't know that much about Alan King's life and people from that era. And his act, none of it was personal. Zero. He didn't tell you about his wife and his daughter. And he, he, it was all in his mind and his observations of people in life, but it wasn't an observation of his behavior. And then when he did interviews, he rarely went deep about any of it. But then we found that he was working on his autobiography with Tony Hendra, who played the manager in Spinal Tap, who was a writer and he passed

the way, I believe, this year. And he talked to Tony for this book for 23 hours, and we found these tapes. And you listen. So when you make a documentary, how much harder is it to make a documentary than actually making a film? Because you have a script, you follow the script, you know, but with a documentary, it's sort of like the research that goes into it to find all these things and then piece them together and make it somewhat linear.

How do you have a team of people helping you out with this? Oh, yeah. I mean, it's a lot of work to just listen to his 14 HBO specials. You listen to every special. I mean, I can't say I listen to every second of every special. I usually use my team to go, let's prioritize. There's a lot of stuff that isn't as good as the best stuff. Right. And so we don't have to, you know, get super deep on the things that weren't working. But it becomes clear that if there's 14 hours of stuff, maybe there's 4 hours of stuff, maybe there's four incredible hours that we have to really pay attention to.

And our editor, Joe Beschenkovsky, who did the Shandling doc and to Kurt Cobain doc, and he did Belushi. He's incredible. He remembers everything. He literally remembers everything. If he watches a special, it just seems to be all in his mind. And he's a real artist and a big part of our process and my partner, Michael Bonfiglio, who I also did 830 for 30 about Dwight Good and his.

I got to get into that. I mean, that was fucking phenomenal. And I know you're a big Met fan. Yes. You're from Flushing. Well, I was born in Flushing. I was born in Long Island. And, you know, I know what it's like to feel like a loser

because I'm a Rangers fan. I'm a Mets fan. I'm a Nix fan. I'm a Giants fan. Giants have had some success. Give me the lineup, 86 lineup in the World Series for the Mets. Can you do it?

It's so funny because I just watched that the documentary about the Mets. It's awesome, six-parters. shit. Yeah, it was fantastic. So let's see. Let's see who I can remember. All right. Wally Backman, Lenny Dykesh. These are right. Dykstra let it off. Then Batman. I mean, I don't know if I could say it all in order. Kevin Mitchell. Oh, yes. Keith Hernandez. Nice. Let's see how, how deep I can go. I have a terrible memory. That's the other thing. Really? I have a pretty bad memory. Like I just thought, oh, my God, you're going to

forgot Ron Darling. Oh, yes. Jesse Orozco. Yes. You know what I did? I was watching that documentary and I went online and I don't know if it was connected to the documentary as like an extra on ESPN. It might have been that they had one of the games from the World Series and I watched a bunch of the game and it was Bob Costas doing the game. interesting how slow it was and how baseball on television they they hadn't decided to try to find ways to amp it up and there's a commercial on the screen during the game and music and energy

and it was really fun and relaxing to just listen to the commentators and it was a completely different vibe i just remember joe garagiolla yeah and Vince scully and they're announcing a game and just like it's so chill and it's like you know and the big question will be whatever happened to oil-canned Boyd, high drive in a right field. Henderson goes back and it's gone. And if you're a young Darrell Strawberry, I mean, I just remember these moments like that.

Sure. I mean, so you're a Mets fan. I love that. I love Doc and Darrell. That was fantastic. Did you get to hang out with them a lot? Mike, my partner, you know, did all the interviews. My, you know, my role I feel in a lot of these documentaries is to really locate the heart

have it. You know, I look at it as a storyteller. For instance, in that documentary, we slowly realized that Doc was still struggling. And it was very difficult to figure out the edit because we thought we were making a documentary about two people who had triumphed over their addictions. And he was still dealing with the addiction. Slowly, we were like, I think that's not what this is. And then I wasn't sure what the ethics were of discussing that. in any way and I didn't want to make a documentary outing someone that was trying to be secret about the fact that they still had an addiction. Especially when they think your motive is to be talking about how they overcame, right, this shit. And now it's like, yeah, that's very, that's a tough

thing to do. Yeah, I'm not trying to make them look bad. Right. But at the same time, as soon as we started, we have to be honest about what we're seeing. And I think we made some artful choices to indicate what was happening. Right. Let the audience kind of see what's going on as opposed to stuffing it down their throat. And just be careful about what we were saying when so you could do the math to see that this is a struggle that lasts your entire life. And maybe Darrell hasn't fallen off the wagon, but he owns rehabs.

So in order to stay sober, he has to literally own rehabs. That's how often he has to reinforce these messages. And Doc, obviously, he's fallen on and off the wagon. He got arrested after the movie was made and struggles. And, you know, I certainly pray that he can overcome all of that. Yeah. But it was interesting to try to look at these two men who had a similar experience. They were very, very young.

And the city looked to them to change everything. Yeah. And then they did. But they were too young to handle New York City and co-opening. and cocaine and partying in the 80s, which was the 80s at its worst. And it ate them up. And I think they were very brave to, you know, to talk about it.

And there's some interesting material in the new Mets documentary, which everyone should say. I wish you would make a movie about the 86 Mets about those planes, those flights, those, those old books about those flights. I mean, I know, but wouldn't that be a fascinating movie? Yeah. Well, I think it's all even different. darker than we think it got it's almost like unacceptable right now to even bring some of the

shit that i think so i think and like a lot of businesses there are things happening that are even beyond right that when you dig deeper uh there's there's behavior you know that is uh you know well i i i i don't want to use the word criminal but but you know there's a lot of bad things happening yes you know that it's not even about today you know it's just how people treated each other how they treated women right and different time period not to say it was right and it wasn't but it was a different well a different time period in the sense that i don't think society had said no fucking way we're not doing any of this right and so something about the culture was a party studio 54 society hadn't put their foot down no and I think that you know certainly the

world of athletes is not a world that is about respecting women and their boundaries and understanding consent and things like that right it is a world of people partying hard getting each other wasted and everything that flows from that right you know which is generally not good inside of you is brought to you by Quince I love Quince, Ryan. I've told you this before. I got this awesome $60 cashmere sweater. I wear it religiously.

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Download the Rocket Money app today and tell them you heard about them from my show. How do you, how do you do it? I mean, you don't stop working. It's like when I was getting all this stuff, I was like, how does he have, he's got two kids, he's married, he's got this movie, The Bubble coming out, he's got a documentary come out, he wrote a new book, he's got all this shit. I'm like, you're like, well, how? How do you do it? How do you balance this without getting divorced? And how do you, are you a workaholic? Would you honestly say you have to constantly be working or you'll be miserable?

It's hard to know because I just went away with Leslie for nine days to Hawaii. And I was felt pretty good in the shutdown. You didn't work? Not much. I mean, I had to make some calls. But I wasn't, you know, pounding it there. I shut it down. And sometimes there's, you know, a summer where we're mainly in shutdown. And I certainly can handle it. But I think that's the thing I'm always trying to decide. You know, am I working for a healthy reason? Am I just trying to keep myself busy and distracted? Am I passionate about what I'm doing? You know, what is the actual motivation for work? Right. You know, I've done a bunch of things.

Do I need to do another one here like this? Right. Or am I just kind of on a treadmill where things come up and you're busy and you haven't really thought through if you want to give your time? to it. Does Leslie make you aware sometimes of it like, hum, hello? Oh, absolutely. I think that, you know, the rhythm of her career is also different than the rhythm of a producer's career and a writer's career. So actors have to be ready when called into action. Right, right. And so, and there's periods between it, which can be long. And then you go and you're 100% committed to making that

movie and creating that character. And then you go home and you rest and you wait and you can, you know, take a hunk of time to recharge where for me everything is you know a long multi-year process so we're working on billy eichner's movie which comes out in the fall you know we've been working on that movie for five years when you say working on for five years is it sort of intermittent like you know notes every like every couple months you're like oh we got to go back to that because i know that you probably have a lot of plate spinning so is it one of these things that every a couple of months, you have to kind of answer these. It's like, when is it? How long before it comes into fruition? Well, you know, it's meetings and discussions of the outline for a long time. And then

suddenly, Billy and Nick Stoller, who wrote it with him and directed, you know, do a pass. So you're waiting. Like, for me, it's different than them. They're working a lot of that time. And I'm waiting to be fresh eyes and give a good read and have discussions about what's working. And then it becomes, all right well how are we going to make this how much money do we need to make this how long would it take who should be in it how would you market it and then that's years of that those conversation and that's true you might have eight of these going at the same time right and you don't know if they're going to go and sometimes you work on it for half a decade and then suddenly everyone says we don't want to make it and you how often does that happen more than you think

I mean it happens you know for sure how personal do you take that depends on the project sometimes you know it's very personal because you're really ready to go and maybe the last second the whole thing crumbles and it's like a runner stumbling and what causes that usually for something just last minute to casting drops out and then you can't crack the perfect chemistry casting again because I'm all about that if I if that doesn't feel right I always think there's no reason to go I'll never push something forward if I don't think all that is a home run right and And sometimes people just say, oh, people don't want a movie like that anymore. Oh, that movie's too weird.

Yeah, we just put out a weird movie. And we don't think people like weird movies. And suddenly you're like, wait, I got four of these. Oh, fuck. That are kind of eccentric and they're not, you know, a generic type of movie. Right. But it definitely does happen. And you have to spin the plates because I remember early in my career, I spent like three or four years on one script because I thought that's what you do.

What script was that? I wrote a script with Owen Wilson. And it was right after Bottle Rocket, which I love. And cable guy, I love Bottle Rocket, just genius. And we wrote this script about a man who got in a drunk driving accident, but wasn't an alcoholic. And his sponsor at A.A., where he was forced to go by the courts, was Rip Torn. And it was Ripped Torn convincing him that he was an alcoholic, even though he wasn't. And this strange friendship between them.

and I worked on it for years and just right when I was ready to go it was nope we don't want to do it and it never happened how often do they never come back or how often do they come back like projects that you are

they say no we're not doing this how often because you hear these things like kickball dodge ball dodge ball and it took 12 years and the studio didn't want to do it and they didn't want to do it and finally after 12 years

that seems like it rarely rarely happens where when something's turned down it hangs in there and comes back i mean we've had that a fair amount of time super bad took forever i mean super bad was floating around when we were doing freaks and geeks wow and we made it in 2006 or around six or seven uh and they had been working on it since they were like 13 years old i mean this was the their seth and evans dream was this movie and everyone said no forever and then And other movies started succeeding, like Talladega Nights and things that I was working on. And then people said, what else do you have?

And so we had a trunk of rejected projects. The other one was Pineapple Express, which was only written because we couldn't believe there was no one to make Superbad. And so we were like, what's more commercial than Superbad? Oh, we could do like a stoner action movie. Like, what if Jerry Bruckheimer made a stoner movie? Perfect. Stoner action movie.

And then we sent that around and everyone was like, no, we don't like that either. And then when Superbad did well, they were like, okay, we'll do pineapple after that. So once you've proven yourself or once you see that their success in this, they go, oh, we believe in this filmmaker. We believe in this team. We'll give them this other one. Yeah, we get Seth and Evans' sense of humor and their style. And we see what Seth is. doing on screen and suddenly it gets a little bit easier and but we've had things get

delayed like you don't mess with the Zohan so Adam says to me Adam Sandler do you want to write this movie with Robert Smigel about a hairdresser who you know a Mossad agent in Israel who wants to move to America and retire and be a hairdresser and so I worked on that with Robert Smykel, who's the best comedy writer in the world. So we had a script we really liked in like 2000 around that time. And then 9-11 happens. And we were like, oh, I guess you can't do that now. Like everything about what we're satirizing is much more heated. Right. I think we We put it in a trunk before 9-11 when there was the Intifada a year or two before that. And then every once in a while, we would take a run at, could you rewrite it?

I thought after 9-11, there was a way to do the movie about a cell, a terrorist cell. And I was saying, you know, can't we do it about, like, Rob Schneider is in a terrorist cell and he slowly falls in love with America. and then in the end he doesn't want to do it and that he teams up with Adam and then that didn't happen right and probably shouldn't have and then one day Sandler just called me and just said we're going to do you don't mess with the Zohan and that was 10 years later 10 years later and smigel rewrote it and got it ready to go and it was a big hit and hit a wind where people were willing to laugh about conflict because it really was a satire of the ridiculousness of people fighting and not understanding each other and not caring about each other.

I mean, it's a very silly movie, but that was the idea that you could do a really goofy movie that in its heart was about that it's ridiculous, that it's just an endless cycle of violence. Obviously, we weren't getting into any real issues of the, of the, Middle East, but somehow it happened at a time when it had quieted down enough where people really enjoyed the movie. Yeah. Do you miss any project from yesteryear, like over the years, all these projects you have? Is there one that you're just like, got to make that someday, got to make that someday? And also, are there most of those projects that you're like,

I can see why I think it made. I don't, I'm never going back there. I'm trying to think what's sitting, you know, sitting around. There's not too many. Sitting around, I wrote a movie for Will Ferrell and Jack Black, like 20 years ago, that was called Demon Streets. It was about two motorcycle cops. Awesome. And it was all based on the, like, the Tupac and Biggie murders, like them caught up in the middle of a similar situation.

Right. And that didn't go. And that's one that I think, oh, I had the energy. I still want to kind of like, yeah. I want to see Will and Jack on motorcycles. Yeah, who doesn't? That would be fantastic. What were you like growing up?

I know that, you know, you were 12 years old when your parents split, right? Yeah, like 14. 14. Was that difficult for you? I was like the defining, you know, trauma, you know, for me. Because, you know, when you're a little kid, And the only thing you have in life is these two people getting along. And you listen to them and you're looking for wisdom from them.

But when they're at full war with each other, and back then, parents didn't go, hey, we're getting divorced, but let's go to therapy to figure out the best ways to not make it hard on the kids. They just, you know, fuck off. They just battled in front of you, like in front of you. Oh, yeah. I know, I know these things. I mean, this was a time when they didn't even think, let's not do this in front of the kids. I don't think I ever heard the phrase, let's not do this in front of the kids. That's funny because my parents, my dad said, I wanted you guys to get through high school and college before we, I did it for you.

I'm like, well, why the fuck did, I wish you wouldn't have. You guys were fucking horrible. Yeah. So they got divorced after you left the house. Yeah, it was 26, 27, and I was like, around there. And I was like, God, I wish you would have got divorced way earlier than that. It was terrible. Yeah. I think someone said once, it's better to be from a broken home than to grow up in a broken home, something like that. Does that make sense? It makes absolute sense.

But so that, that I think mentally was hard for me because I felt like they're making a lot of mistakes. And now I don't know what I should believe of what they should believe of what they tell me to do with my life because I see they're not making good decisions and how they're treating each other. Yeah. And that's the thing that threw me. And also, they fought for a decade. It wasn't a rough three months. It just went fully into my adulthood.

It wasn't a wound that resolved itself. And so it just kept going and going and through college and going and going and going. and that certainly motivated me to want to get my shit together and know how to make a living and know how to take care of myself because I felt like, oh, I need to be on my shit. Did it also help you focus on, God, I have to go out with healthy women? I have to, I want to be in something healthy.

Or did it sort of deter you away from dating for a while or just hooking up with girls maybe at a certain age and just enjoying yourself and going, I'm not getting married after what I've seen. I didn't really think about it in those terms. I just thought there's a better way to do it than that. Yeah. And I understand more about it now.

You know, when I got older and I could talk to my parents about it. And I talked to my mom a little bit about it before she passed. And it was easier for me to understand them. And now that I'm older than they were when that was happening, I have more of a sense of what. what went wrong and also what went wrong and how they were taught to relate to to their spouses in the marriage and that they didn't learn from their parents how to communicate and how to do that right. Yeah. I mean, you know, people who were just a generation fresh to the United States,

they didn't know the psychology of communication and how to talk to each other and how to address difficult things with each other. So it would just erupt because there's no, language for how to listen. I mean, it's like we know what deep listening is and, and, you know, my whole world is self-help books, but they didn't have that. Really, you read a lot of self-help books. Oh, constantly. But when I was a kid, I remember my dad got this book called Your Erogenous Zones by,

like Wayne Dyer. And it was a first self-help book ever in the house. and then they got divorced. Oh, no. I remember my dad said to me once that he went to therapy with my mom and the therapist was just hard on my mom. Just whatever.

You went to a therapist and in that session, the one time they went, he was hard on my mom. And my mom was like, we're not doing that again. And sometimes it's as simple as that, right? You get the shitty therapist who doesn't know how to manage the moment

and it shuts off the idea of self-exploration. And later in life, I pushed my mom to go to a therapist. She was being, you know, really, you know, manic and neurotic and hard to deal with. And I finally got her to go. Then she came back and I said, how was it? And she said, he told me I was right about everything. That's what I wanted.

The best therapist ever. Exactly. Yeah. Your mom's working in a comedy store and you started doing comedy. What is she doing there, first of all? Well, what happened was my mom moved out, and so we were in Sasset, and she moved to Southampton. And they owned a restaurant together, and one of the bartenders was this guy, Rick Messina. I know Rick Messina.

Does he still have the Wiffle Ball Stadium in the back of his house? He built a Wiffle Ball Stadium in his backyard. Strawberry Fields. Exactly. Yeah. And so he was the bartender at the restaurant they owned. And so when she was divorced, she didn't have any money. So she started waiting tables and selling ads for radio stations.

And this was an upper middle class woman who just wanted to play tennis and raise her kids all day. And now she's, you know, blue collar in the workforce. Right. And he would run a comedy club out of this hotel, the Southampton Inn in the summers. And he hired her to be the hostess. And so looking back, and I've said this before, I always thought, what did he pay her? What do you pay someone in 1984, 83 to seat people at a comedy club? Not a lot.

I mean, minimum wage was $3.35. I remember. So what could she have made? And then I thought, well, on some level, I would assume she just did it for me because she would want me to see it. really because I was such a comedy freak and she never indicated that ever and on some level it was a humiliation to her to work for her bartender you know she was like someone that her grant her father was a big record producer who produced Janice Joplin and she came from a lot of money and now she's seating people at a comedy club all rich people all the people that she would be embarrassed to have that job in front of

because my mom is very materialistic and very aware of that stuff. And I love that she had those kind of jobs. I just thought it's cool. Like, oh, my mom's a waitress at this diner. That's amazing. Yeah. But to her, it was terrible.

And I think on some level, she must have thought, or maybe psychically felt there's a reason to do this because it's where I met all the comedians and how I started interviewing comedians. Rick gave me a job as a dishwasher at Eastside Comedy Club in Huntington. And everything came out of my mom taking that job as a hostess at this comedy club. If she didn't take a job as a hostess in a comedy store, you think your career would have been completely different?

A thousand percent because I, you know, I started working as a dishwasher, then a busboy, and I would watch the comedians. I used to watch Eddie Murphy and Rosie O'Donnell in like 1983, 84. And that's how I made some connections that paid off later in life. and it was where I first did stand-up in high school was at East Side Comedy Club. Jackie Martling used always come into there and it was like Bob Nelson and Rob Bartlett and all the Long Island legends.

And that gave me the courage to interview comedians because I had met them. So I thought, oh, I would love to interview them. So I interviewed them from my high school radio station. And that's when I was able to say, how do you do it? How do you get on stage? How do you write jokes? What's this going to take?

Because really, that's why I interviewed people initially. To figure things out. Just to figure things out. And to make them real. Because, you know, you see Hal Lyndon on TV. He's like a magical figure. Yeah. Right.

And then when you get in the room with people, you think, oh, this is possible. You're a person. Oh, Jerry Seinfeld in 83, 84. He's from Long Island. Oh, you're kind of like me. So it's not crazy that I would dream that I could do this. Do you remember the first time you went on stage that very first time? Well, my dad was great.

He used to drive me to these clubs, Chuckles in Miniola and governors in Levittown, which is a great club, which is still there. Levittown, wow. And he would drive me and drop me off and pick me up a few hours later. And they were both very supportive. My mom and dad, although they had issues with each other,

both always said you could do it and believed 100%. And that was the main reason why I think I had. So they always believed in you. they not for a second thought that there was a chance I would fail were they loving were they like I love you whatever you yeah they were like that yes 100% and so that was never a question like there was no shame of this is a dumb profession right they knew I loved it and they were excited for me to try to jump into it and so I would go to all those clubs as an open micer in high school and that that's how I and did you really enjoy it did were you enjoying it or were you

nervous nervous wreck to begin with and you started to the diarrhea the diarrhea the dude what is that I would have diarrhea I wouldn't understand it it would be like explosive diarrhea every time I before I would go up yeah I would just fall apart so exhausted feel like shit

and I was so terrible at it were you I mean I was so bad when I started when I think about things I did on stage I'm like your worst fringe freak in an open mic night who's terrible But I just kept doing it and I learned that it would take a while to figure it out. That's what comedians told me that it takes a while to figure out who you are.

So in my head, every time I bombed, I thought, oh, I'm on the path. It's good that I'm bombing because I am learning how to do this by bombing. And I had a pretty healthy patience about just getting through this early stage. So you were comfortable at some point just bombing. You were used to it. I wasn't comfortable. I hated it. But I was willing to do that.

Right. And I thought, well, I'm 17 years old. If it takes me eight years to be a worldwide megastar, so be it. And I'm 25. So I had this psychotic feeling like it'll work out. Like it actually didn't work out. But, I mean, I did get good enough to start traveling and being a normal comedian. You go to USC or fast forwarding.

This whole thing is not going to be that linear, but I don't care. But you go to USC, you have a. you're part of a writing program and you drop out after two years? What was the reason why you dropped out? We didn't have enough money to pay tuition. That's what it was. It was the main thing, which is no one had the money to pay for it. But it's funny because you look back and you go, it is an expensive school.

How much was it? The tuition was six grand a semester in 1985, 86. And it literally was impossible for me to get six grand. There was just no way to get it. And I got exhausted trying to figure that out and push everybody for the money. And everyone was having real serious financial problems at that time.

And so I was a little bit half-assed at school because I thought, I'm not going to finish this program. And you liked it? I liked it at the beginning. And then I think I started getting bummed out that it was clear that I couldn't do it. I couldn't afford the film and the camera rentals. And it just wasn't going to work.

And then I think I lost some interest in it. And I was getting more interested in stand-up. So when I left, my family wasn't like, oh, man, no, let's, we've got to figure out how to get that money. They were like, great, what are you going to do now? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I had been doing some stand-up at college and booking shows at USC when I was there. But I did learn how to write. I had one class with Sid Field, the guy who wrote, you know, the screenwriting book that everybody reads.

And later, when I had friends who started getting opportunities, I realized, oh, I think I know how to write screenplays. It's like that scene in taxi where out of the blue Reverend Jim starts playing the piano and he plays the most amazing classical piece. And then he stops and he goes, I guess I took lessons. That's how I felt when, like, suddenly friends needed writers. Okay. Wendy's most important deal of the day has a fresh lineup. Pick any two breakfast items for $4. New four-piece French toast sticks, bacon or sausage wrap,

biscuit or English muffin sandwiches, small hot coffee, and more. Limited time only at participating Wendy's Taxes Extra. Ever wonder how dark the world can really get? Well, we dive into the twisted, the terrifying, and the true stories behind some of the world's most chilling crimes. Hi, I'm Ben. And I'm Nicole. Together we host Wicked and Grimm, a true crime podcast that I'm

unpacks real-life horrors one case at a time. With deep research, dark storytelling, and the occasional drink to take the edge off, we're here to explore the wicked and reveal the grim. We are wicked and grim. Follow and listen on your favorite podcast platform. Wow. What was it like? I mean, you've said it before, like you were roommates with Sandler, but everybody wants

to know at least a story. What was he like living with at that young age? Was he like, John, do the fucking dishes? It wasn't like that. Adam always had a rental car and he never, ever cleaned it. He would just return it when it was filled almost to the roof with fast food, like garbage. That was like a really weird thing that he did. He just, he wouldn't wash it and it would trash it, return it, get a fresh one for years. He did that. I mean, at that time, and I think it's a lot different. than now comedy was much smaller there was no internet and you felt like the whole comedy business was about a hundred people and there were certain people you would meet and you would think I think that person is going to be a gigantic star even when they weren't near it at all you felt the bubbling up of certain people like Adam and you felt Jim Carrey living with him

you like this there's something about this guy everyone around Adam was like Adam's is the next Eddie Murphy. You just knew it even when he was bombing. It wasn't like he was killing on stage and you thought that as a result of the success of his performances. We found him hilarious. The crowds was hit and miss.

But there was a certain charisma, which is the charisma which led to everything that happened that you felt when he was in his early 20s. If anything hotter because he had so much energy as a friend to make you laugh. because he wasn't making movies.

So all that energy that he's put into his career in the early days was just used on you at dinner because he was so funny and he didn't have an outlet. What would he say to you? He just was at that time a very, you know, gregarious, loud, hilarious person. He loved to make everybody in our group laugh. And I think when you become super famous, that quiets down a bit. because in a way the world is paying attention to you.

Right. But when no one knows who you are, no one's paying attention to you, it's more fun to make a spectacle out of yourself. There's a freedom too, isn't that? Yeah, and you still have the knucklehead energy that we all had of college. Right.

And you've just brought it into the real world. So he was just making us laugh as friends a ton. And then, you know, he would do, you know, phony phone calls all the time. Because I really felt like it was. He didn't know what to do with this energy, and he would just, you know, call Jerry's deli and complain about a turkey sandwich that made him sick and really put them through it for like 15 minutes of negotiations about can he have a free sandwich and what kind of sandwich

can the free one be? Does it have to be the same sandwich as the one that made me sick? I had the turkey, but maybe I'll have roast beef this time. And I was aware that this was something special. I started recording it because as a comedy fan, I'm like, like, I'm aware that no one's this funny, that I'm not just like with some guy, that this is world-class funny. This is the people that I love, like Michael Keaton and Seinfeld, this is another, another level.

And I believe it's going to turn into something. And then it, and the weird thing is, you know, one day he says, hey, I just got Saturday night life. And then he's gone. Wow. That's incredible. You know, I look at all this shit, not shit, sorry, but you produced all the, I call it shit. You do? Yeah, sure. Good for you. It's your shit, man. You produced cable guy

anchor mentality and night, super bad, pineapple express for getting Sarah Marshall, get them to the Greek bridesmaids, the big sick. And first of all, I think, you know, you're 54 years old. You're five years older than me and I feel like a complete fucking failure. I love all the shit you've done. But I look 20 years older than you. No, you don't. If you shaved, you have gray hair. That's it. That's the only fucking difference. But one thing, you know, people talk about is freaks and geeks. And we're just briefly, you know, I've read interviews where you talk about I knew it was going to get canceled. I knew every week.

Is that true? Did you really feel like from the get go? Oh, yeah. This is going to get canceled. And why? What was the studio's complaints? Why did you feel that this wasn't going to make it? Well, we made it at a time when there was no head of NBC.

So the head of programming left and suddenly there was a more business-oriented guy who was above him who got to make all the decisions. And because he wasn't some programming guys. who felt the need to ruin your process. He just loved the script and we said, hey, we want these people in it. And he went, great. Usually, as you know, the network will screw with your casting choices

because it's the only place that they really can mess with your show. So when you go, I'd like this person to be the lead, they're like, bring me four choices. Which is the dumbest part of all of television is this moment where you debate the network. So if you create a show and you say, I won this person as the lead, if you lose that fight, you've already ruined your show. Your show is done. You might as well not shoot it. It's all about that.

And so we've had good and bad experiences with that. But in this experience, he just greenlit everything. We shoot the pilot. Jake Kasden came in to direct it. We had Bill Pope as the cinematographer who did like The Matrix, just one of the greats of all time. And Paul Feig was just so tuned into what he wanted to do with that type of show. And then they hired a head of programming. And very quickly, someone just said, he doesn't like it.

He just didn't get it. He doesn't get it. They said he went to private school. He's not feeling it. And so from the very beginning, we knew we were in trouble. And, you know, you can see it in the time slot and the marketing and the fact that we would be on for a week. and off for two weeks and back for two weeks and off for three weeks. So there was no rhythm to create a relationship with the audience.

And we felt like our days were numbered. And then he took me up to lunch and he said, can your characters have more victories? Because it was a melancholy show about getting your ass kicked. And the solace you take from your family and your friends when you're really having a hard time. And you say, no. That's not what this show is about.

Yeah, and I had to. And I was young enough to not know. that it's bad to be honest. I didn't really know how to work those relationships. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so the thing that I did to give him a victory was there was an episode where Bill is in gym class and there's a high pop that comes up to him

and he catches it and he goes crazy celebrating. And then he doesn't realize that it's not the final out and everyone is scoring and tagging up. That was as close as a victory. Right. And so it did turbocharge the show because, you know, when you think you might get canceled at any second, you know, you use all your good ideas. Nothing saved for season two and three.

Right. And so it became a bit compressed. Yeah. And you shot the finale. We shot the finale like three episodes before the end of the season. Which is crazy. We didn't want it to end abruptly. On nothing.

Unsettled, right. And so I remember Paul and I were in Las Vegas. That's hilarious. I flew to Vegas to see Rodney Dangerfield with Adam. By the way, that's my favorite comedian of all time. Yeah. So he's the one that we loved. I had seen him as a kid and got to hang out with him.

It was a magic night, but I bumped into Figue who happened to also be in Vegas. And we were just talking about it. I was like, man, let's just do the final episode. He hadn't directed. I felt bad. he was the best writer on the show. It was such a vision for him. I didn't think that he could keep up with the writing if he was directing.

And so I hadn't let him direct because I just felt that that was so important. Right. And so I said, just write and direct the last episode. And then we'll shoot it in the middle of the season. So if we get canceled, we'll have a finale. And in our conversations in Vegas, we were like, what would have happened to Lindsay? and we thought, I think she'd become a deadhead. Like, that seems to be the middle between the burnouts and the athletes would be the deadhead.

And then Paul wrote and directed the most incredible finale. It's really remarkable. Then I felt guilty that he hadn't directed more episodes, but I think the reason why the whole show is good is because he hadn't. Do you see that not now, but retrospectively, when you, well, when you were on set, you get canceled. How did you deal with that failure? Was it that it was it overwhelmed? Because you don't deal. It seems like you don't deal with a lot of failure in your life. Maybe I'm wrong. I didn't handle any of that well because I really had this gut feeling that magic was happening while we were shooting it. It didn't

matter if anyone was watching it. I just thought, I think this is great. And the idea that someone would just go, stop doing it. It felt like if you were a guitar player and someone walked up to you and said, I'm taking away your guitar and you're never getting another one for the rest of your life. That's what it felt like.

And I had to sense, this doesn't happen, this combination of writers and actors and directors and crew. This is special. So the idea that someone would end it, you know, led to me just internalizing all this rage and, you know, I got a herniated disc and I was on Vicodins and in the editing room, ranting.

And it was just a terrible time. I remember I was like being really not nice to the editor. He everything, but I'm also on Vicodin. Of course. And I've been there. And I'm not being nice to him because he just keeps like something very simple. He just keeps doing wrong over and over and over again. And I'm just like, man, what is wrong with you?

What is wrong with you? or just something like that. And he's like, my friend died yesterday. Oh, man. And I was like, oh, man. But seriously, though, what is wrong with you? And so you do kind of lose your mind in grief because as a child of divorce, the show was a family.

And I couldn't really tolerate the randomness of the disillusion of the family and I felt like we hadn't reached our potential creatively that we were just getting going and obviously a lot of the movies was an attempt we're an attempt to try to tap into all that was happening creatively with all those different people right on the show you know when you're doing uh when you're directing I always wondered about this are you the kind of director that you get it as written say it as and then you kind of let you kind of let you know people improvise do you shout things out what's your process on set like that yeah i think that's about it i try to write it as well as i can or have them write it as well as they can

kelly clarkson did you did you do that like that was seth and evan making a list of curses so we know we're going to whack steve we have five cameras on it we know we can do it once we've explained to Romney and Seth and Paul Rudd the basic vibe of their reactions to it, although they did react differently than we had planned. And the whole thing was like a start and stop improvisation. But one of the key aspects was that Steve would yell at the waxer. When I was a kid, I went to Action Park. Remember New York?

Did you see the documentary? Yeah. Incredible. And so those cars that would like ride these alpine slide cars, everyone would always wipe out. They would skin their elbows, like all that, you know, they would like fall out of the cart and be on this like cement track. People died. Well, I think in other rides, do they die doing that?

I don't know if they were dead in that. But we would all get really badly injured and go to the nurse. And when we got to the nurse, she would put a disinfectant on where the skin had been ripped off. and every person in New Jersey would have the same reaction. They would spray the disinfectant and then the person would be like, you motherfucker, you know, at the nurse, the poor sweet lady. And every person would walk up like they weren't going to do it and then they would do it. And so that was what was in my head that he would explode at her in a way you wouldn't see coming.

And so I said to Seth and Evan, just make a list of interesting curses. and then I said make one column of clean ones so we have alternatives in case we need to show this on ABC one day we can re-edit a clean version and so that Seth walked up to me and there's a video of this on YouTube there's the making of the waxing scene and one of the things just said Kelly Clarkson

but yeah it's very open space we want to get a good version of the scene we want to throw lines at people we want them to improvise you know we're really open to anything happening and you know sometimes the best joke in the scene is the the random thing that's just on a list that Seth and Evan hand you right do you ever get things that you just are like this this this isn't working it's just not working I mean it's fine it's fine I got to let it go I got it move it on we've worked on the scene we've been

improvising it's not funny there are definitely scenes where you think well I guess that's not one for the history books and then you have hope when you get into post that you could fix it. And then every once in a while, you just have to put a joke in the back of someone's head, an ADR, where you just record a new joke. Right. You show the other actor. And we have saved a thousand scenes. With those post-production jokes. Yeah. And I remember Wes and Owen talking about James Brooks forcing them to do that in Bottle Rocket. And if you watch Bottle Rocket, there's an incredible joke on the back of people's heads.

Yeah. But, you know, a lot of that process I learned from Ben Stiller when we did the Ben Stiller show, because he would do this agent character and he would interview people like Roseanne and Tom or run DMC. And it was him giving terrible advice. It was all kind of insulting. Right. And what he would always do is tell them we were done shooting this sketch.

And then after they left, he would shoot his single again and just say much meaner things. the things he was afraid to say to their face. Oh, my God. And then we would just riff all these crazy runs when they weren't there. Right. Do you laugh a lot? Are you constantly laughing? Are you so in your head because you want it to be great?

You want it to be great that you don't, you're not feeling the funny as much as everyone else is. It depends. Certain things you are like, that's funny. Okay, that'll work. Let's move on. And then other times you just start giggling. I just made this movie called The Bubble. The bubble, which screams that come out.

That's going to come out in the later in the spring. And crazy. This movie is insane, folks. Yeah. I laugh so hard. There's so many, it's so ridiculous. And it's like right at the beginning of the pandemic. And all these actors are at this hotel.

Yeah. And they're just all going crazy. Yeah. It's like actors trying to make a dinosaur action movie in London during the early part of the pandemic having nervous breakdowns. And Fred Armisen plays the director. So he's supposed to be thinking the Sundance winner who gets. his first big budget movie and he doesn't want to handle it and it's during the pandemic and fred

would make me laugh out loud so there's some people that just make you laugh yeah Maria Bamford plays uh there's a TikTok star who's been jammed into the movie played by my daughter iris and we did zooms with Maria Bamford as her mother so she's zooming conversations with her mother and Maria just gets me every every time she's like is Timothy oily fans in the movie? I love Timothy oily fans. Timothy, all of fun. Seth Rogan, is it true that you credit him with influencing you to make your work more outrageously dirty? Well, certainly Seth felt like comedy wasn't edgy enough for his taste. Right. So when we first started working together in movies after Undeclared, where we couldn't be that edgy, we were desperately trying to get someone to

pay attention to super bad and not having a lot of success. One of the stories that always makes Seth and I laugh is that there was this producer that we added to our team because we thought maybe it's us. Maybe if we had a more powerful producer, he could get us the money. So we have this producer join our team. And then suddenly he gets hired to be the head of Paramount. And we think, well, now we'll make the movie. He's the head of Paramount.

And the first thing he did his head of Paramount was to say no to the movie that he was the producer of. But during the writing of the 40-year-old Virgin, you know, Seth was one of the producers on it. And he really thought it was funny to make Steve uncomfortable. So in his work as the guy in the stock room with Steve, he went hard and dirty and uncomfortable. And it made us laugh so hard to do that to Steve. And Steve, I think as a comedy person also isn't like a dirty comedian. Right. You know, he's a smart, subtle, witty, brilliant guy and he'll go there.

But it really made Steve uncomfortable. And to the point where Steve wasn't sure where the line should be in the movie. And I think Seth was a big, you know, a big influence on a lot of, you know, that kind of, you know, talking about a donkey show in Mexico type joke runs. Right. You know, and that extended through, you know, other things. like, you know, Super Bad and Pineapple Express. I mean, he really wanted to put the pedal to the metal on some of the choke style. You take a lot of risks with with newcomers. I see newcomers like Pete Davidson and Amy Schumer who hadn't a ton of, didn't have a ton of acting experience.

And so when you take on a role like that, like this is the lead role. We're doing King of Staten Island. How much work is that extra on you to get performances out of someone to, I mean, that seems like it's a difficult task. You said, yourself up for someone who hasn't really acted or maybe they just naturally fall into place it's not really about the performances as much as the writing the writing just takes a lot of work it just takes why is that what do you mean because you know when the movies work they're usually very personal even if they're big comedies the core idea of it is a personal idea to amy or to pete about relationships or about getting over trauma and grief and so you're asking someone to

really go there. These aren't like Ghostbusters type premises. Yeah. They're very personal. And so you have to develop with them over sometimes an extended period of time. With Amy was kind of short because she wrote. If you gave her notes, she would hand you a new draft like five days later. She really worked hard. And when we get to the set, usually we've done auditions and we've done table reads and By the time we get there, we know what we're doing. The hard work is in the conception of it. I think Bill Burr is just genius in that movie, too. Train, right, or King of White Island.

He's such a good actor. He's such a... I love that guy. Yeah, he was in an episode of crashing with Pete Holmes, and we were all blown away by his acting. I know. And I just thought, oh, my God, there's so much more here with Bill. And he's not in a lot of movies where he's, you know, featured and given the

space to create from his place. Right. And very early on, Pete was like, you got to get Bill Burr, you got to get Bill Burr. And we were so lucky. And then he was even 10 times better than we thought he might be. But again, like the core of that is very personal. Bill and Pete know each other. There's an intimacy there. Bill cares about Pete. And even though in the movie he's annoyed by Pete, you kind of feel underneath that there's some love there. Right. And so they have that chemistry that comes from life that we're able to tap into in the movie this is these are from my patrons i have a patron account these are rapid fire got you this that you just answer him as quickly as you would like to or i'll babble for 11 minutes on each you could do whatever the hell you want

i know you're a busy guy so i don't want to keep you too much i just love this i seldom am really just like excited about something i could talk to you for hours and i'm not going to do that to you because i know you're busy so here we go shit talking with jud appatoe Nika, what does your style of feedback to an actor sound like? Usually I'm walking up and I'm nervous. So I have to hide the fact that I'm nervous about doing my job well. So it's usually enthusiasm coming through my stress about if I'm going to screw up the scene. So it might be like, yeah, I think that's, that's working.

Maybe there's a thing that we could do where you. That's probably the vibe. too. Yeah, I'm not like, ee, I'm just kind of like, I probably sound stressed. So people are a little insecure like, is it Judd Happy? Well, no, more like I'm praising, but also letting you know we're going to do a whole bunch of other things. But the key thing I do as a director is I let people know, we're going to take our time. I think most people's acting diminishes because they don't know how many takes they're going to get. Right.

And so you're like, God, I better nail it. Maybe I'm going to get two shots at this. I always tell the actors, we're going to be here until we like it. And tell me if you like it. Do you like what you did? Because I'm feeling good now. And I feel like just saying that to people, they get way better. And all that stress that screws up, their performance disappears if they know that you're going to give them time

and that you're going to pay attention to if they're happy with it. Do you get actors that are just like, I don't want any more takes. Do we got it? Come on. Come on. What else you want? Not too often. But I remember with Fred Armisen, he would just make me laugh.

would make him riff for like 10 straight minutes sometimes. And he never would give you a look like, okay, Judd, we got it. Never. Really? The first second looks exactly the same as 10 minutes. Like, if I didn't say cut and you had a digital card, a digital memory card that lasts at an hour, he would never stop and it would all be at the same level. Were you ever nervous about giving an actor direction that was just kind of like,

oh, he's going to snap out of me or some guy who just like, isn't that fun to work with? You don't have to say any name. Well, Rip Torn was terrified because anything you said to him, he was going to knee-jerk know you. Right. So if you said, Rip, I think that you might be a little more irritated here. I'm not irritated.

I know what's going on here. I don't need to be irritated. And then what he would do is, you know, blow up at you. And then if you did like three more takes, on the third one, he would suddenly take your note. without talking about it. And so that I realized was the trick. He never wanted to say you were right,

but then he would try it. Leanne, what surprised you the most about being a parent? Or what surprises you? About being a parent. You know, everything surprised me because, as you know, from Knocked Up, we didn't know we were going to become parents. And so what surprised me was that every single thing I knew about being a parent was from what I had seen in TV shows and in movies.

and everything that was difficult about being a parent wasn't in TVs and TV and movies. Like none of it applied. That was the thing that surprised me. Right. Does Iris and Maude, are you happy they're going into acting? They're into acting. They're obviously doing a lot of stuff.

Mods on Euphoria, right? Are you excited about this? You like that she's kind of following your footsteps. She's doing this. I mean, obviously, you're not an actor, but are you happy about that? It's hard for me to judge it because as a kid, I so wanted to do this type of.

of work. So there's no part of me that thinks this is a mistake for them to have the same fun I'm having. But yet it's very stressful and you want them to be in it for the right reasons and you want them to be passionate about, you know, their artistic life. You don't want them in it for the ego. Right. That's tough. That's tough. Yeah. And so we've talked about that from birth. You know, like, why are you doing it? You know, because if it's just to get liked by people, it won't work. Yeah. It has to be because you care about what you're doing. And I think, you know, they're both making choices that are about quality and following their passion. So Euphoria has been pretty incredible this year, and it's been fun to see Maud on the show.

And Iris is really funny in the bubble. Yeah. And we had a good time shooting that. So did they like your direction? Do they go, Dad? I don't know. When Iris was on Love, the TV show we did for Netflix. Thank you.

When I would show up on the set when I wasn't directing, like John Slattery directed, a bunch of the episodes, Iris would always say, why are you here? I'm like, well, I'm the producer of the show. I don't need you here. Like, she's so enjoyed not being directed by me. Maya P., which of your films would you love to make a sequel to? And of all the, out of all the movies. I'm pretty close to deciding if I'm going to make this as 50 in the next year. I have an idea for it. I'm trying to decide if people really want it. But I do get it. I want it. I'll be 50 in four months. Yeah, I get a lot of feedback on this is 40.

I feel like the world of TikTok and Instagram has elevated it. There's so many little moments that circulate. And I get a lot of people saying, are you going to do this is 50? It's time. Like, they've tracked it that it's been 10 years. So probably that one. And I always wanted them to do a sequel to Superbad.

And I know that Jonah said, oh, it would be funny to do it when we're 70 or 80. But I really wanted them to do a Superbad in. college where Jonah flunks out of college and just shows up and visits Michael Sarah at college. But everyone, everyone was like, nah, we don't want to screw up Superbad by accidentally making a crappy second one. And I would always say the same thing. Well, that's like saying don't make the second episode of the sopranos. Right. Like, so why do you think we would screw up the second one? Yeah. Danny, I'd like to go back to the start of Judd's career and ask the favorite joke you wrote for Larry Sanders. The show was ground.

breaking. A favorite joke I wrote for Larry Sanders. It couldn't be a joke or a moment or a scene. You know, one thing I'm very proud of that I worked on at Larry Sanders was the Jim Carey moment in the finale. So Jim Carrey said he would do the show after not really answering for six years. So for six years, I asked him to do the show. And he would always not say no, but not say yes. And then finally I called him, I said, Jim, it's literally the last episode. This is your only shot to be on the Larry Sanders show.

And he said, I'll do it if I could be the best person who's ever done it. It has to be the best scene in the history of this show. That's what he said to you. He said to me, I said, okay, Jim, let's do it. And so we were trying to figure out what it would be. And there was a very funny idea about that Jim would come on. And then in the commercial break, he would be really mean to Larry and say, oh, you're leaving, you're leaving TV.

You think you're going to do movies? I'll destroy you. So we had that idea, but we didn't know what else to do. And years before, when both of us were single, one night we were talking to these women, the improv, and they live across the street. And we wind up across the street, and like nothing, like, happened. But they made us pancakes in the middle of the night. And then a woman put on Jennifer Holiday in, what's that movie?

dream girls doing and I'm telling you you're that big song and she just lip synced it for us and it was like a blue velvet kind of bizarre moment with me and Jim in these strangers apartment watching this woman lip sync very emotionally to this song and I never forgot it and I said to Jim maybe you could sing that song on the last Larry Sanders and he didn't did it. It was so incredible. And after the first take, Gary was like, yeah, that's it. We're done. And Jim's like, no, I want to do it again. I can do it better. And Gary was like, you want to do it again? Like, he couldn't believe that there was any energy in Jim's body to like try to do it. And it was better. And it was better. And it was better. And here's

the crazy thing. I'm editing the documenting about Gary Shanling. And I get the footage, the raw Dailies. Because I'm going to like recut the sequence in the dock. What's in the dock is not how it aired. And I noticed my mom is in the audience. And also the guy who owns Largo, my good friend Mark Flanagan, is in the audience with John Bryan. Wow. Who scored Eternal Sunshine and The Spotless Mind and a lot of my movies. And that really blew me away. So in the dock, I use the moment where you see my mom that's beautiful did you get emotional oh yeah i just couldn't believe it it was weird do you get emotional a lot oh yeah i'm an easy easy cry what makes you cry uh everything everything i could cry literally the amount of times i'm crying it's it's like when you see your daughter

have a good performance or something oh yeah oh yeah literally everything i mean uh i mean i like being emotionally accessible and and vulnerable so yeah tv movies you know you're most things. Yeah, I'll, I'll go really hard. I think about when I was a kid, my grandfather died of a heart attack when I was a senior in high school. And I'm at his funeral. And he had produced a record by Red Buttons, the Borschbeld comedian. And I'm sitting in a chair bawling my eyes out, just snot and just crying. And then suddenly, like someone said, Judd, this is Red buttons and I like shook his hands. Your emotional mess. Mid-snoddy,

bawling cry. Oh, man, that's amazing. By the way, you still go to therapy? You do therapy? Oh, yeah. You go to, you get anxiety. You deal with all that shit. Yeah. A lot of times I have two therapists. Really? I've had, last few years, I've had two therapists with two different ideas. One's a little more of a more Buddhist mindfulness.

Going to the Gary's. handling path maybe. And the other one's a little more about like evolution and fight or flight response and just almost the brain chemistry that leads to your panic or anxiety or depression. And I found that all really interesting. Just the way evolution has built you to be depressed. It built you to be scared. It thinks it's saving your life.

My therapist said to me, there's nothing your brain would like to do more than get you to stay in bed all day because then you're safe. Yeah. Because then a bear won't eat you. Yeah. And just the reality of what you're working against, that your body holds on to the bad stuff and kind of doesn't hold on to the good stuff

because remembering the bad stuff and evolution saved your life. Oh, don't go in that cave. That's the one with the bear. And so you'd remember it the rest of your life. But if you had a nice meal and ate some berries in the woods, you would just forget it five minutes later. And that's really what life is that you tend to hold on to, the dark stuff

and so yeah and lately lately I haven't I haven't gone a little while because I there's a couple of self-help books I like so much I'm trying to see if I can really tune into them there's one called the untethered soul by Michael Singer that is it's all about the things we do to try to make everything at life work and how it makes no sense that you want every interaction to be positive

and everything to work out well and how we're just making ourselves crazy mentally by that process. We're trying too hard, maybe. You know how I look at it? I think of it this way. I think I'm in comedy, but my big issue is that I need to lighten up. Oh, that's the perfect ending point.

Look, you got the George Carlin documentary. What's it called? We have a title yet? It's called George Carlin's American Dream. George Collins, you must have just come up with that recently. Well, that was, yeah, and that's the name of the big routine that some of the documentary is built around and then sicker in the head you could you could order online now the book of interviews and the bubble will be out this spring on netflix there'll be a

trailer coming out in a couple of weeks and you'll see something super weird super weird super weird we went somebody called me up and they i let them see it and they went it's bonkers you just it is it's it's more bonkers than anything you've ever done i think yeah it's it's as close as we get to it's not exactly this but it is a kind of a combo between tropic thunder a christopher guest movie and and a mel brooks movie sure i i could see that it's meant to just be a way of saying to the audience the last few years have been so terrible can we at least laugh at it yeah can we just take a moment to commiserate about what we've been through look at the shit we've been through this is kind of like a little piece of a

about it. This has been an absolute joy. I can't thank you enough for being here. Ryan's a big fan of years as are everyone. I think everyone out there is probably a fan of Judd Apatos. I appreciate that. It's safe to say that. I hope you have more and more success and bring us more and more good feeling movies. And I hope a 50 year old virgin, not 50 year old virgin. That could be it. Maybe I do a combo crossover. Crossover. That would be amazing. Thank you for allowing to be inside of you today. I've always wanted it This is really I mean

I reached out for it You did And not only that But you know I guided you into me I just said a message to him This never happens by the way I just said I'd love to have you on my podcast

And usually it's like oh whatever whatever He immediately responds and goes Let's do it I'm a listener I like it I was on the I was on a plane I was listening to the Kevin Neal an interview And you were talking about midnight

In the Garden of Good Evil And I literally looked up and someone was watching it in front of me and you were on the screen. And I took a picture of it and sent it to me. What are the odds of that? It was really weird. It was a random movie.

Yeah. And Kevin Nealing was amazing. I love Kevin Nealing. He was like, Rosemont, is this therapy for you? This is, he's just leaning. Oh, my God. He's so funny.

I love him. Thank you. This is amazing. Thank you. All right. What would you like mostly about that one? Just did that it happened? You were.

You know, I, you know, it's funny. is you never ever have asked this but while I'm walking out with Judd he didn't see it but he goes hey you go

hey can you get a picture well no what happened I think you sensed I didn't ask I sensed it in your face you're like you just went ahead and said

here's how you did it and it was really kind of nice it was very subconscious you went hey let's all get a picture and then you're like oh I can't get myself in the frame here I'll just do one of you two and then you did one

bam I remember that now you do I didn't ask. We did it. I'm not good about asking for things and you did it for me. That was very nice.

I appreciate it. I appreciate you appreciating it. Yeah. And I think he appreciated it. He's a gem, man. He's a legend. He's a, Judd, if you're listening, thank you. Thank you for coming on the podcast.

I hope you enjoyed it as much as we did. And just a reminder, guys, if you like the podcast, please write a review. Please write a review and follow us. At Inside of You Podcast on Instagram and Facebook. At Inside You Pod on the Twitter. I'm going to be in St. Louis. this coming weekend to sign autographs and to do a Smallville Nights

improv show with Tom Welling, get your tickets. I'll be in Liverpool the weekend of May 21st. June 10th, I'll be in Metropolis, Illinois, Australia, June 17th through the 28th. And also my band, Sunspin, we're coming out with a new album. We're going to be playing May 28th, which is a Saturday.

Am I correct? Is that a Saturday? How would you know that? It is a Saturday. You're sure? I am. Because I'm on a plane on the 20th. It is.

It's a Sunday. It's a Saturday, folks. So thank you for all the support and love, but come, come watch the band. You can go to stage it.com and get tickets, or you can go to sunspin.com. You can also book Zooms. You can go in cameo with me. I'm on there. And what would I do that, my patrons, my lovable patrons who support the podcast?

I talk about you every week because it's just the truth. And you stick around and it's, it's marvelous. Sometimes I feel like, do I want us to still? do this podcast and then you know so much feedback so much love that how could i not want to do it so thank you for keeping me motivated excited and feeling blessed uh go to patreon.com slash inside of you if you want to join patreon and help the podcast out right now also big thanks to ryan right here my man bryce my man jason couldn't do the podcast without you literally couldn't do it i'd be fucked i'd be completely fucked

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years. Great. We love you. Be good to yourself. Most importantly, thank you for allowing me to be inside of each and every one of you. It means the world. And I'm wearing the hat today. I haven't worn the hat in a while. I don't feel like I wear the hat as frequently. It's a good hat. It's a good hat on me. And I can't find one. that's just like this. It's got to be a big enough hat to fit my head. I've got a big head, Ryan. You got a Sasquatch head.

I got a Sasquatch hat and head. Is that what you said a head? Hat. Head. Whatever. I love you guys. Thanks so much. Hi, I'm Joe Sal C.

Hi, host of the Stackin' Benjamin's podcast. Today, we're going to talk about what if you came across $50,000. What would you do? Put it into a tax-advantaged retirement. account the mortgage that's what we do make a down payment on a home something nice buying a vehicle a separate bucket for this addition that we're at 50,000 dollars I'll buy a new podcast you'll buy new friends and we're done thanks for playing everybody we're out of here stacking benjamins follow and listen on your favorite platform