Sick in the Head: Conversations About Life and Comedy

by Apatow, Judd

  (Clip from Camille: Armand runs into Marguerite at the casino.)

  Judd: We’ve come a long way, we really have.

  Mike: We have. When you think that, right around this time, the whole idea of acting in a movie was being invented by Garbo and Barbara Stanwyck and Bette Davis and a lot of people—they were doing less and less. What’s interesting is that being inexpressive becomes the big deal. The most famous line in the history of movies is somebody saying something wrong. It’s the line, “Here’s looking at you, kid.” But Bogart actually says, “He’s looking at you, kid.” That little inexpressive nothing became a classic thing. And the big stuff sort of went away. That’s my first point and probably my last.

  Judd: You started in improv. What was that transition like, from improv to acting and directing? Who taught you how to do this?

  Mike: Improv taught me how to do it. Elaine and I were very lucky because our pals that we started with at this improv place had no particular idea. I mean, there were big talks about socialism and stuff, but nothing you could act. So we had to go out there and learn through horrible trial and error what you need to do to make an audience happy. And slowly, we discovered a principle. Elaine used to say, “When in doubt, seduce.” Because seduction is immediately a scene. And, of course, so is conflict. If you say black, I say white, and we have a fight. There only is one other kind of scene, I discovered—there are fights, seductions, and negotiations. Most of Shakespeare turns out to be a negotiation because it’s all about power and rulers and so on. When you’re making it up, you learn what has to happen to keep an audience interested and excited but, most of all, laughing. And then it becomes part of you. For instance, when I started to direct my first Broadway play, which was Barefoot, I had them doing so much business onstage that Dick Benjamin—who replaced Redford—said, “I can’t. I can’t learn all the business and the lines.” And that’s the thing. If you keep them very busy, they’re too busy to act. And then it looks like life.

  Judd: The first things you did, right out of the gate, were ridiculously successful. Your comedy team, your first play, Barefoot in the Park, your first movie, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? How did that happen?

  Mike: Well, Barefoot in the Park was somebody else’s idea. There was a nice producer who said, “How’d you like to”—after Elaine and I broke up, I was sort of the leftover half of a comedy team—and he said, “How’d you like to direct a play?” And I said, “Well, let’s try. Let’s go somewhere in summer stock and see if the play’s any good. If I’m any good.” I said, “I’d like to see if we can get that blond guy I saw last week—Redfield, Redford, something.” And we had no time because we’re going for summer stock. We had five days, so I just threw it all in and we figured it out. I felt like I’d come home because all this time I’d been thinking about it and working at it, I didn’t really want to be an actor.

  Judd: Why did you give up acting?

  Mike: I didn’t like it. I’m too good of a director to like me as an actor. I can get better people. So I did. And I just liked it more. I liked being there much more than being here. I still do.

  Judd: And you did Death of a Salesman recently. I mean, if you started with Virginia Woolf, what did you learn in the middle if you—could you have done Death of a Salesman back then?

  Mike: No, I don’t think so. I think Virginia Woolf—I was unbelievably lucky because Virginia Woolf, among many, many other things, is possibly the only play that is entirely in the present. Have you noticed how plays are always somebody endlessly yammering about the past? That never happens in Virginia Woolf. The past is brought up but when it’s brought up, it’s part of a trap that’s being set. Then the trap is sprung and there are terrible consequences as a result—all in the present. The present was my bag, you know. And so we just did it all in the present. It was good. Now, you: Did you start with funny?

  Judd: I was a stand-up comedian. I was like you—a stand-up comedian who realized I could get better people to act. At some point, I realized my friends were way funnier than I was as a performer. So I started writing. I would write for them. And then slowly they would give me jobs, which turned into punch-ups and screenplays. But I really wanted to be Jerry Seinfeld. That was my only intention when I was younger.

  Mike: What did Seinfeld mean to you?

  Judd: In terms of what comedy meant to me, I liked Seinfeld, but I liked that comedians were pissed off. I liked that they said everything wasn’t fair. People like George Carlin would talk about the injustices of the world. Richard Pryor and Monty Python mocked how society worked—class systems and government. I was just attracted. I must have been very hostile as a kid. I didn’t know why, but I liked that people were telling everybody to fuck off. But I found that I didn’t have very strong opinions when I was a stand-up comedian. I didn’t have the anger to do it. So I wrote.

  Mike: You saved yourself, you know. Because the one thing I understood the minute we were all comedians in this group—and I saw what happened to some people and less to others—is that it’s very, very corrupting to the spirit, doing comedy. You have to be almost a saint like Jack Benny was, like Steve Martin is, to avoid being corrupted by it. There’s very little work where the work and the reward are simultaneous, and comedy is that. And you can see it doing terrible things to people because it’s constant, instant gratification. There are people who can resist it, like Chris Rock. People of a certain character and high intelligence know how to avoid it. Were you aware of having to build certain things in to protect yourself from that happening?

  Judd: I would always get post-stand-up shame. If I was really funny, when I got home, it wasn’t that I thought, Oh, I need to do it again, I was just so embarrassed that I had been so arrogant to feel the need to do that. Is that how you felt when you were doing the Nichols and May show? How did it feel for you?

  Mike: I never told this to anybody, because it’s so sort of depressing and pointless, but I had a sadist fantasy onstage. I figured each laugh was me cracking a whip. But there’s this weird thing that happens to you when you’re out there, dressed funny. You can wear better pants and stuff because you’re not a character. You can feel like you’re even sexy in everything because you’re up there and the audience is doing what you want. I didn’t love it but I also didn’t suffer from it as Elaine did. We closed the show while we were still sold out because she couldn’t take it anymore. I kept saying, “Take what? It’s an hour and a half and all we do is talk!” But it took something out of her. She’s a better actor than I am, for one thing, so she really went through stuff that I was faking. But it’s also something else. It cost her something. It didn’t cost me anything because I didn’t really like it. To risk everything on a play, I mean, your feelings and ideas and secrets and everything, is, to me, much riskier than laugh, laugh, laugh. But the greatest comic writers, like Noël Coward, always had contempt for the funny stuff. They liked the prefaced boring stuff because that was so meaningful. I hate boring stuff and I like laughs, but I don’t wanna do it.

  Judd: Who’s the funniest in person that you’ve collaborated with? Neil Simon?

  Mike: Neil was very, very funny. I think the most difficult person to work with, because we were in such pain all the time, was Robin Williams. You just pray he’ll stop because you might get in real trouble if you don’t stop laughing soon. While they were lighting a scene, he would do these improvs that I can’t begin to describe. Once there was an astounding one that lasted about twenty minutes—we were all begging him to stop. The next day I said, “How much of that could you do again today?” And he said, “Oh, none. It’s gone.” It was all unconscious.

  Judd: In your directing, do you prefer doing comedy? What’s the difference between doing something like Angels in America, which is also funny at times, and—

  Mike: I think all good plays are both. You can’t be only funny. And God help any play that is never funny.

  Judd: I’m always happy when the idea is something serious and w
e find a way to get people emotional about it but still get some laughs in. We were talking about, you know, scenes where people fight, where you still can get laughs but the fight is still real and intense. Maybe we could show a clip from This Is 40 and talk about conflict in these movies. Let’s take a look at a scene.

  (Clip from This Is 40: Debbie catches Pete playing with his iPad on the toilet.)

  Mike: Your movie is so entirely about being that thing that isn’t two people but something more. How you get it and how hard it is to maintain and how, since it leads to the best thing of all, which is children, how central it is to our lives. It is our lives. But your take on it, which is to concentrate on the most unsentimental parts of it, that every—even taking a dump. How much more down-to-earth can you get? But it’s not only about love; it’s about spirit and it’s about what love really is, which is not mawkish; it’s an everyday happiness that you couldn’t describe to a Martian because it looks like something else. Happy people look like something else. They don’t look like happy people. Have you ever noticed that? They look like involved or maybe even angry people.

  Judd: Happy people look crazy. I mean, the people who seem happy.

  Mike: Yes, there’s something wrong with them, clearly. But I think that in a weird way, your trademark is: How far do we go in our ludicrousness? There’s no end to it. It can go as far as you like. But the thing that happens when you have a baby and you’re both in bed with a baby—for the first week, two weeks, three weeks, and then forever—is simply like nothing else in the world. You can’t celebrate it in a mawkish way because then it’s somebody else. To do it your way, you can’t do it without laughs. You can’t do it in life without laughs, either, because you’re right into it. And also, I have to confess, I’m a sucker for metaphor. I go on about it too much and I keep saying metaphor is dead, nobody wants metaphor. As Nora Ephron said once: “Well, I feel terrible about the metaphor, but what can I do? It’s like the whale, you know?” And then I realized it was bullshit and I was very pretentious to worry about it because it’s there or it’s not there and you don’t have to name it or analyze it. Sometimes I get a script and I think, How do I tell them that there’s no reason to tell this story? Here’s a question that I can’t answer: Why is it worth telling one story and not another? Well, the easy answer is it’s, it’s really secretly about all our lives. And there are plots like that, we know that. Virginia Woolf reminds you of the hardest parts of your own life. But to throw that all out and go and put on the screen or on the stage what actually happens without a metaphor, I think that’s very exciting. That’s a gearshift that we haven’t had.

  Judd: We’ve talked about the fact that life is overwhelming. There’s a lot, there’s too much to handle. You’re trying to be a good spouse and a good parent and have your kids do well at school and you’re trying to take care of your health and you’re trying to deal with your extended family. And, at some point, it really brings you to the brink of losing your mind. You’re trying to get along with your spouse at the same time and there always seems to be a lot of humor in this failed attempt we all make to just be able to do it all. And that was the original idea behind the movie. But I think that what happened was, as we got more specific, it became more universal. The smallest details are the details that people come up to me and say: “I’ve had that conversation seven times this week.”

  Mike: Exactly. It’s everybody together saying, Oh God, that’s so true. And therefore, it’s not bad taste, whatever that is, and it’s not a metaphor: It’s life.

  Judd: I didn’t start out thinking that I would make personal movies. I started out writing broader comedies, but this area has interested me and I feel like, you know, you write movies to figure out why you’re writing the movie. That’s something I read somewhere and I thought, Well, that does make sense.

  Mike: There’s something very important here, which I think is when it’s your time and when it isn’t. If you make movies, your early movies are about your time. Everybody knows the story you’re telling. Nobody says, “Why are you telling me this story?” Because everybody in your generation is in that place, roughly, and they recognize it. It’s a direct communication. It makes perfect sense that you’re making something that did not exist before. But it’s also incredibly familiar because you’ve hit the mark. You’ve found a part of people that feels new. It has its own language, its own insults, its own ethos. And then, when you get to middle age, that doesn’t work anymore and you’ve got to do other things. The Graduate was described endlessly as the epitome of its time. But its time didn’t know that because when it was coming out, the guy who produced it made me go to campuses and show it because he felt we need to create a “market.” And if I gave you the rest of the night to guess what the majority of college students said about it, you would never guess. They said, “Why isn’t it about Vietnam?” Because that was the only way to get laid. To be able—to be very deeply concerned about where our country was. They wanted everything to be about that, because they hadn’t yet understood that you can believe in a number of things at the same time.

  Judd: Do you feel comedies don’t get the respect they deserve?

  Mike: That’s funny you should say that. I think they get the respect they deserve. They’re always more successful. People are happier with them, they live longer. What movie is enshrined like Some Like It Hot? No movie. To be good and funny is about as good as it gets. Who cares about Academy Awards? I mean, you used to get an Academy Award by being very sick and not dying. Maybe it could still work—who knows, try it. But I don’t think any of that stuff matters. What matters is how much it connects with people.

  This interview originally took place at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City with a live audience.

  MIRANDA JULY

  (2013)

  I sometimes worry that I am going through life using only a small portion of my brain. This worry is at its most intense when I spend time with people like the writer, director, and actress Miranda July, who has this way of coming at everything from a special, never-before-thought-of angle, a quality that fills me with jealousy and rage. Every thought she has is original—or at least, feels that way to me. I love her, but damn if she doesn’t make me feel like I’m not seeing the world as clearly as I should.

  A few years ago, she asked me to do an interview with her, and the only rule was that we were not allowed to ask each other anything related to show business. Admittedly, this is hard for me. But in the end, she brought something out of me that I don’t think anyone else has. Attention all interviewers: Somewhere in here is a lesson about how to open someone up to new thoughts and ideas.

  Judd Apatow: Okay, first question is: What was your scariest nightmare? Miranda July: Like an actual asleep nightmare?

  Judd: Yeah.

  Miranda: Occasionally I write them down, which is probably why I remember it. I had taken this suicide pill that would kill me. Then after I took it, I strongly realized I didn’t want to die—

  Judd: Oh no!

  Miranda: But I had an antidote. I took it and was so relieved. Then a few minutes went by and I realized that the antidote was in my cheek and I hadn’t actually swallowed it. You had to take it in a certain amount of time or it was useless so I knew, Oh, it’s too late! It was in my cheek! And then I just felt myself fainting and was like, I can’t believe it—just this one little oversight. And that was it. I died.

  Judd: And then you woke up feeling refreshed?

  Miranda: (Laughs) Or like, Surely there’s some way I can use that in my work.

  Judd: The one I always remember was really vivid—like it was actually happening. It’s me on a plane, I’m the only one on it. It’s going in and out of mountains and steep cliffs and it’s clearly out of control. And I used to have nuclear war nightmares all the time as a kid. The sirens going off. I don’t know why they stopped; maybe we’re safer now?

  Miranda: Yeah, or are we?

  Judd: Actually it’s worse now bu
t for some reason I’ve tricked myself into thinking that’s not an issue. Okay—your turn.

  Miranda: What’s one good thing and one difficult thing you feel like you got from your father?

  Judd: Well, my dad was a big fan of comedy, and I think he thought he was funny. I can’t confirm that his sense of humor is funny, but he carries himself as someone who’s hilarious.

  Miranda: Right. The idea that trying to be funny might be a “thing that one does.”

  Judd: His success rate is lower than he thinks. (Laughs) But he loved comedy and his interest in comedy sparked mine. A difficult thing I got from him was a general sense of nervousness, just not feeling comfortable in your own skin. I got that from my mom as well. They got divorced, but maybe that’s why they found each other. (Laughs) That agitated way of thinking, I need to stay on top of things to make it better in the future. A lot of future thoughts. We weren’t very “present” people. In my house there was a lot of “Next year will be my year!” My mom had a lot of fun energy when I was a kid. She was a really happy person, then after their divorce she became really unhappy, which threw me. During the divorce, they were more tuned in to their pain than they were to me. When your parents behave in ways that make you feel unsafe, you think, Oh, I guess I’m in charge of myself. And when you’re fourteen, that’s not a great thing. It kind of never goes away. As a producer, I’m always assuming things are going to crash and I’m trying to figure out what could go wrong before it happens. It’s helpful for work. But it’s a terrible way to live your life.