Sick in the Head: Conversations About Life and Comedy

by Apatow, Judd

  Judd: Is it like fifty percent of the fight is just going on and walking out there?

  Jerry: Yeah, yeah. But you make one little mistake, or one stupid mistake and in five minutes it’s very hard to get an audience back. People do it, but it’s tough.

  Judd: So where do you go from here? Like right now you’re established as one of the top comedians and you get work, not only in the clubs but in Atlantic City. How much farther can you get?

  Jerry: It’s a tricky point that I’m at. But everyone that you’ll be talking to is that. Because there’s a lot you could do with TV series; you could do a sitcom, which a lot of people don’t want to be associated with. You could do movies; they’re hard to get and it’s hard to have a hit. You could just do stand-up and hope that you catch on after a while—like Gallagher, you know. There’s a lot of different ways. I’m gonna do some acting. Because it’s easy for me and there’s a lot of good vehicles for exposure as an actor. But stand-up is what I am. I’m a comedian, and the acting will just be to improve my visibility.

  Judd: And what kind of vehicles are you looking for?

  Jerry: Quality. That’s my only real consideration. It could be anything, as long as the people are trying to do something good. I don’t want to do a piece of junk. I’m not starving, you know.

  ADAM SANDLER

  (2009)

  I met Adam Sandler when I was in my early twenties. He was known at that time as the stud man from the MTV game show Remote Control. He also happened to be an extremely original and gifted comedian. We all knew that Adam was going to rule comedy one day; we just didn’t know yet how that would come to pass. What would the trigger be?

  The first step was when he was asked to do stand-up on David Letterman, and killed; then he was flying off to audition for Saturday Night Live; and then, suddenly, I didn’t have a roommate anymore. Those days living with Adam were, in some ways, the time of our lives; we still get on the phone every now and then, twenty years later, and reminisce about it. It was a time when all we did, all day long, was kill time and write jokes and then, at night, tell jokes at the Improv, then we ate fettuccini Alfredo with Budd Friedman and one of the many comedians we looked up to. It was a special, carefree time. We were all working so hard to succeed, but having fun being knucklehead kids, too.

  In 2009, I got to make Funny People with Adam, which turned out to be one of the most rewarding experiences of my career. He was so successful at the time, I honestly wasn’t sure I would be able to maintain control of the project; I worried about how far he’d be willing to go with so much on the line. But Adam was a true collaborator. He was incredibly brave. He never once said, “I don’t want to do that,” or, “That might make me look bad.” And in the process, he revealed a side of himself that most people had never seen before. Even more fun than making the movie was the press tour. From the beginning, Adam declared he didn’t want to do any interviews without me, which led to me and Adam being in rooms together, having to do interviews with a different person every eight minutes in countries all over the world, and trying to figure out ways to make each other laugh. One of the high points of that press tour, for me, was our appearance on the Charlie Rose show, because Adam is an extremely private person who rarely talks in public about his life and career. We did it together, like old roommates. I liked it so much that I put it on the DVD for Funny People. And I present it again here now.

  Charlie Rose: I am pleased to have Adam Sandler and Judd Apatow back at this table. Welcome.

  Adam Sandler: Great to see you.

  Charlie: Now, where do we start? Tell me when you two first met.

  Adam: After I moved out to L.A., I was twenty-two and went onstage at the Valley Improv. There used to be an improv at a hotel in the Valley. They had that for a few years. It’s gone now but, uh, I did pretty well that night. That wasn’t a normal thing. Usually I didn’t do well and so I ran to a phone to call my dad—“It’s going all right, Dad.” And if I remember correctly, I think Apatow was lurking around the phones, kind of looking at me, and I’m, All right, this guy’s looking at me. And then he came up to me and said, “Hey, I’m Judd, I saw you out in New York, you do that Baryshnikov bit.” I used to have a bit I’d wear sweatpants onstage and say here’s my impression of Baryshnikov and I’d pull them up and show the lack of bulge—

  Charlie: The what?

  Adam: The lack of bulge. Anyway, Judd mentioned he liked it and we started talking.

  Judd Apatow: It sounds like a come-on. I love your bulge.

  Charlie: So he started talking to you—and then?

  Adam: And then we became friends—very good friends. I was out there with a few guys from NYU. We all made the move together and then they couldn’t afford rent anymore so I was like, I need a roommate who’s going to pay.

  Judd: I don’t remember that. I don’t remember that.

  Adam: Everybody was moving out of that house.

  Charlie: Where were you in your life, at that point?

  Judd: I went to USC cinema school for a year and a half and then I basically ran out of money and interest. How I knew that was, during college I went on The Dating Game and I won a trip to Acapulco, but it was happening during finals week—so I dropped out of college.

  Charlie: Oh my God. How was Acapulco?

  Judd: I got sunburned the first day and couldn’t leave the room for the next two days. And so I was living with my grandma Molly and my mom and working the clubs at night and emceeing at the Improv. So I was happy to move out to L.A.

  Charlie: You were doing stand-up and emceeing at the Improv?

  Judd: For money, I worked for Comic Relief producing benefits during the day so I had enough to pay my four-hundred-and-twenty-five-dollars-a-month rent.

  Adam: He was making five hundred bucks a week. He was the only one of us who was guaranteed to pull in five hundred a week. We’d always say, “How’s he getting this Comic Relief job?” He would go in for a few hours and come back—he’s getting five hundred for only a couple of hours a day. There was a lot of anger towards him.

  Charlie: What was he like as a roommate? I mean you were, he was Felix and you were—

  Adam: I guess I was Oscar, you know, yeah. Judd’s a very, uh—

  Charlie: Fastidious.

  Adam: He is.

  Charlie: And after being roommates, you remained friends? You stayed in touch?

  Judd: When Adam got Saturday Night Live, he left and, you know, there was a question of whether or not he was going to keep the apartment in L.A. I quickly realized that wasn’t going to happen. And so I got another apartment.

  Adam: That I had a room in.

  Judd: That, yes, you had a room in.

  Adam: He moved to another apartment, and just for my L.A. visits, which weren’t that frequent, he had an extra room for me.

  Judd: It was very exciting because Adam got the job on Saturday Night Live out of the blue, which shocked me because Adam’s stand-up was kind of mumbling and bizarre and he didn’t do characters. He didn’t come from Second City, and then suddenly he’s like, “I’m the new cast member on Saturday Night Live.” How did that happen?

  Adam: You know what is insane? How cocky I was back then. When I got offered Saturday Night Live, they offered me to be a writer and then eventually a performer and I was going, “I don’t know if I want to do that. These guys don’t understand.” And all my friends were like, “Just do it, you idiot.”

  Charlie: Dummy.

  Adam: Exactly.

  Charlie: So why didn’t you make a movie together until now?

  Adam: We did. We’ve worked on a bunch of movies together.

  Judd: I started doing The Ben Stiller Show, which was a show that Ben and I created and was on for a season on Fox. That was the first big TV gig I got after writing jokes for people for a long time. I was doing that while Adam was on Saturday Night Live and then we both started writing movies. Adam wrote Billy Madison and I co-wrote a movie called Heavyweights with Steve Bri
ll, and our friend Jack Giarraputo that Adam went to college with was the associate producer.

  Adam: He [Jack] was your assistant.

  Judd: He was my assistant. And then he moved over to Billy Madison, and then we worked together a little bit when I did some rewrites on Happy Gilmore. So every few years, I would come in and help out. I always wanted to do this but I did feel like I needed to have learned enough to be able to take on something so ambitious.

  Charlie: And what did you want to do?

  Judd: To make a movie with Adam and to make it personal because, you know, we know each other so well. I always wanted to tap into that but I also didn’t know how to direct so I needed ten or fifteen years to get that together.

  Adam: I always knew Judd was—you know, we have similar tastes. He’s doing movies differently than I did them but we always made each other laugh. We always felt comfortable with each other. We liked the same things. Judd liked a lot of stuff I never even heard about, a lot of music, a lot of movies. He brought me in to a different world. Then Judd gave me—he said, “Check out my movie, Knocked Up.” I was shooting a movie at the time. I watched it in my trailer with a couple of my buddies and I was just like, Apatow is unbelievable. I called him up and said, “Judd, whatever is next, let’s do it.” And he said, “All right, I think I’m going to have something.”

  Charlie: See, that says something interesting about him, doesn’t it? Looking out for himself by calling you up and saying, “You know I admire what you do, and think about me the next time you make something that might be right.” And on the other hand, he’s a huge star when he makes that call.

  Judd: I was thrilled and then I instantly had to go in my notebook and be like, What would be the idea for Adam? Oh, maybe this one? I’d always wanted to make a movie about comedians. It’s not a subject that’s been handled great on film and if you do it badly, all comedians will hate you for the rest of your life. So you feel that pressure but in the back of my head I thought, I think I’m one of the few people that know this world enough to get it across on-screen. It just took a long time to work up the courage.

  Charlie: Before we talk about Funny People, both of you know comedians, you understand comedians. You are comedians. What are the common denominators among the people you know who do what you do, whatever variation of it: write jokes, stand-up, comic films, whatever?

  Judd: In personality, it’s different. There are some guys who are kind of smart and witty and funny, and there are some guys who are just a little bit off, and there’s some guys who clearly got a beat-down at some point during their young life and that made them feel the need to get attention.

  Charlie: And so which one is he?

  Adam: So many of those.

  Charlie: All of the above.

  Judd: There is a moment on Garry Shandling’s DVD commentary for The Larry Sanders Show where he talks about this with Jerry Seinfeld and Jerry Seinfeld says to Garry, “Why can’t you be a comedian just because you’re talented and you’re smart and that’s why you’re a comedian?”

  Charlie: That’s what I would ask, yes.

  Judd: And Garry just goes, “Why so angry, Jerry?” I think that captures it.

  Charlie: Okay, Funny People.

  Judd: Yes.

  Charlie: What’s the passion you had for this?

  Judd: I wanted to talk about when I first became a comedian and the moment I was allowed into the world of comics, which was very exciting for me. The people I worked with when I first started were incredibly nice to me and I was just in heaven being around them. You know, I wrote for Roseanne and Tom Arnold. That was one of my first jobs. They bought me a Rolex for Christmas. They paid me eight hundred dollars a week and suddenly I could afford valet parking. It was all positive so I knew I needed to fabricate something and then I had another idea, which is, I wanted to write a movie about someone who is sick who gets better—

  Charlie: Who is sick with a terminal illness and thinks it’s all over.

  Judd: Yes, and it’s about how he realizes that he’s more comfortable being sick and the way that makes him feel, in terms of appreciating life, than he is when he gets better. Suddenly, there’s time again and he starts becoming neurotic and has kind of a meltdown. That was the initial thought.

  Charlie: In your mind, what’s the push-pull between, I want to tell this interesting-but-serious story and at the same time, I make comedies?

  Judd: I thought that if this story happened in the world of comedians it would inherently have a lot of humor in it. But what I thought in my head was, I’m not going to let the joke count determine what the movie is.

  Charlie: I’m not going to go for easy jokes?

  Judd: I’m not going to go for big set pieces. Usually when you make a comedy, you think, Okay, every ten minutes something crazy has to happen. The energy has to kick in. And here, I just said, Well, there will be a lot of stand-up in the movie and the conversations will be funny and intense, but I’ll let the emotional life of it rule the day in terms of how this works. And that was tricky to do. It’s tough to shake it off and just say, Okay, no, this scene’s intense and that’s it. When you’re testing a movie, if it’s a comedy, you hear the laughs and you go, That scene works. But if it’s a sad scene and you’ve watched it two hundred times, it’s a little trickier to go, How did we do there? Did you feel something? I wish there was a noise for feeling. Then I could go, Okay, they made the weird noise.

  Charlie: Adam, tell me about George Simmons, your character. How is he different from anybody you played before?

  Adam: He’s a little more raw. He shows a darker, nastier side—you know, what I like about playing the guy is you’re never sure what the response is going to be. Seth Rogen plays my assistant. He’s a nice young kid and one second I’m warm to him and the next second I’m abusing him. Seth never knew which way we were going to go with it, and when I first read the script I was like, “Oh, man, I am such a bad person in this movie.” And he would always say, “Really? You think so? I don’t know. I think he’s a nice guy,” and I’d be like, “I don’t know, I don’t know.” But the way Judd put the movie together was like, All right, you see why this guy became a certain way and you forgive him.

  Judd: That was the thought I had. I had a little notebook and right before we shot I made little notes, things to remember. Like: Don’t forget these four things. And one of them was the entire movie is just a journey to understand why the character is like this and when it ends you completely know him and you know what his struggle is. But it takes a while to connect the dots.

  Charlie: All right. There’s something called “Apatowian.” Explain to me what that means.

  Judd: I don’t know, exactly—

  Charlie: What do you think it means? In other words, what is it if you say it’s an Apatow movie?

  Adam: I guess it’s used right now with saying it’s, uh, there’s buddies involved in the movie, and language that feels natural. And cursing.

  Charlie: A lot of reference to sex and women.

  Adam: Exactly. What I love about this movie, I—on occasion, Judd has heard some, you know, uh, what is it? What do they say? What’s the negative on you right now?

  Judd: That I’m a sexist?

  Charlie: No, misanthropic.

  Judd: How would you define that word?

  Charlie: Someone who hates everything.

  Judd: See, I think I’m a wussy. I’m a wimp.

  Charlie: Tell me how you see this.

  Judd: Okay. Well, what I thought about when I was making the movie was that there are traditional structures of comedies—and film in general—and when you go against it, it disturbs people. You know, it’s the movies like John Cassavetes’s movies and Robert Altman movies where they’re meant to make you feel things you don’t want to feel. Now that’s not part of mainstream comedy but I thought it was important to think about. There’s this quote from John Cassavetes. He said, “I don’t care if you like me or hate me, I just want you t
o be thinking about me in ten years.” I do want you to love the movie—I think that is the most important part—but I want to get under people’s skin and provoke in addition to having a hopeful message.

  Charlie: All right. “Funny People feels insular, as if Apatow’s whole world consists of nerdy jokesters who were angry, lonely kids who got rich beyond their dreams and ‘f’ women who’d never have talked to them in high school but are deep down still angry.” That’s from New York magazine.

  Adam: What is the problem there?

  Charlie: Yeah, exactly. You’ve got to help me on this. We got to understand what’s—

  Judd: It’s wrong in a couple of ways. One is, I had a fantastic girlfriend in high school who was very nice to me. Her parents were very nice to me. So I wasn’t the guy who didn’t have a girlfriend. In terms of it being an insular world of comedians, it’s kind of a ridiculous criticism because it’s a movie about comedians. And in terms of comedians who get successful or who are unhappy, you only have to look at Michael Jackson to see what fame does to people in terms of everyone giving them everything they want. How unhappy it makes them and how much difficulty they have connecting with individuals when they can only connect with the masses. I think it’s all very real stuff I’m talking about. It may not be real to everyone, but—

  Charlie: Who’s it real to? Twenty-five-year-old males?

  Judd: It’s a way of talking about how we come up with our priorities for our lives through the eyes of a comedian, but we all deal with this. How much time do we want to spend at work versus how much time do we want to spend with the family?

  Charlie: All right, here’s another one: “[Apatow’s] man-child universe, with its mixture of juvenile raunch and white-bread family values, has conquered American comedy.” Is that you? Middle-class values and man-child universe?