by Apatow, Judd
Spike: I did, but not skate videos. In high school, we made these little videos on camcorders but they were always edited in camera.
Judd: I remember doing that, too.
Spike: You’d press the button and it would take two seconds for the thing to start recording and then it would always be like somebody waiting and then they’d start moving.
Judd: Who were you hanging out with back then? The nerds? Indie kids?
Spike: There was one video class in our school, and it lasted for one semester, until they realized they didn’t have a teacher to teach it. So most of us would just go down to this basement room where there were these 1950s cameras and a switcher and we kind of fooled around with it. Mostly, the kids just used it as study hall. But then one kid brought in a camcorder from home and we started making videos. I don’t know what kind of kids they were. My world was outside of school. I went to school as little as possible. I went to the BMX shop instead and went on tours in the summer.
Judd: You were racing BMX?
Spike: Freestyle, not racing. I was skating, too.
Judd: And that eventually took you out to L.A.?
Spike: I started going out there when I was fifteen or sixteen. I was going on these summer tours with this bike team called Haro. Even before that, I met these guys named Andy Jenkins and Mark Lewman at a magazine called Freestylin’. Freestylin’ was like—even without me really thinking about what authentic meant, it was authentic. It was written by guys that ride bikes for guys that ride bikes and it’s in the language of that world and it didn’t try to explain anything to anyone outside of it. You just knew. When I was thirteen or fourteen, I got to know them a little bit because of this BMX shop that I worked at called Rockville BMX—it was sort of the epicenter of the East Coast BMX scene. So when I went to California when I was like sixteen, I met them in person. And then I started writing for their magazine in high school.
Judd: So you went back to Maryland, and you’d write for them from Maryland?
Spike: Yeah.
Judd: And then you came out to L.A. for good?
Spike: Yeah. In my senior year, they asked if I wanted to be an assistant editor after I graduated.
Judd: And what did you think was going to happen? What were you trying to do?
Spike: I was worried. I was worried that adulthood sounded scary. I thought I was going to go work at this BMX magazine for a year before I went to college because I thought you were supposed to go to college and you had to go to college.
Judd: It was a gap year.
Spike: It was a gap year.
Judd: You’ve had a long gap year.
Spike: Yeah, I still haven’t gone back. But I just thought I had to go to college or I was going to be a fuckup and a failure. My parents went to college and it just, it was scary—that question of what am I going to do for the rest of my life, and how am I going to support myself?
Judd: What were you going to study if you went to college?
Spike: I didn’t know. I did apply in my senior year, before I got that job offer. I applied to all these film and TV schools, communication schools.
Judd: I went to USC film school.
Spike: I applied there. I applied to all of them.
Judd: I had terrible grades but I wrote an essay that was all about how much money I was going to give them when I was successful. I went into great detail.
Spike: That’s way more sophisticated than I could have ever been at that age. I wouldn’t have had the confidence to put my point of view and personality into it.
Judd: I had an English teacher in eleventh grade who asked us to write our autobiography. I didn’t want to write it because my parents were going through a difficult divorce. So I just made one up about how I was undercover at school and I was sleeping with all the teachers. I just wrote this very aggressive, funny essay and she pulled me aside and said, “You’re funny. You could be like Woody Allen.” I always wished someone would say something like that to me.
Spike: You mean you wished that before? I had no idea who Woody Allen was in high school. Like, I was so beyond—
Judd: You weren’t watching movies then?
Spike: I was a late bloomer in a lot of ways.
Judd: But so I tried to get into film school because I couldn’t think of a major that matched up with wanting to be a stand-up comedian. What made you want to go to film school?
Spike: I definitely knew I liked film. I mean, I liked photography. I didn’t understand how film worked, but I would certainly be hypnotized. I liked Star Wars and Empire Strikes Back, movies that made me fall into a world. I spent a lot of time playing in my room and making up worlds.
Judd: Did you read?
Spike: Not a lot, but yeah. I think that I might have had some reading problems. I’m still a super-slow reader. If somebody wants me to read their script, it’s like dread—I know it’ll take me a good six hours to read it. But, you know, I wish—I think it’s rare to find a teacher like you had. I had a photography teacher in high school who was cool and encouraging, Mr. Stallings. But for the most part I would write something that I thought was funny, a short story or something, and the teachers would say, “Bad handwriting, bad grammar, no paragraphs.” They would rip it apart and give me a bad grade.
Judd: No acknowledgment of the soul of it?
Spike: No acknowledgment of the humor or imagination or whatever. In elementary school, they thought I had learning disabilities and they wanted me to get tested, you know, at the room down the hall. There was a special classroom for kids with learning disabilities.
Judd: Do you think your reading problems made you more visual?
Spike: Maybe. I mean, it does seem like directors often come to directing through either photography or writing and I was definitely more, you know, I liked writing. But as soon as I got to the magazine in California, I started focusing on photography because it was more exciting to me.
Judd: What were you getting paid?
Spike: Fifteen grand a year, and then I got a raise to eighteen grand a year.
Judd: That’s not bad.
Spike: That was amazing, actually. For back then, a kid right out of school? And I loved what I was doing. After a year I thought I was going to stay out here for another year and then go to school next year. And it was halfway through that second year that it dawned on me: Most of the kids getting out of college would love to have the job I had. And I started to realize how much I was learning and that this was kind of—
Judd: This was your college.
Spike: This was my college. And I was around all these other really creative writers and photographers and interesting people. I would just watch them, watch how their minds worked, ask them all a million questions, and be inspired by them.
Judd: I had such a similar trajectory, because I came out to college and I knew I couldn’t afford it. There was this ticking clock. I only went for a year and a half but I knew from day one that my parents wouldn’t be able to afford it. I knew it could end any day. I got a job at school making burritos and I was making a little money trying to do stand-up comedy at night, but it dawned on me that no one in my family was obsessed with figuring out how we were going to pay for it. My whole family was happy when I dropped out. But when I was in high school I wrote for Laugh Factory magazine. And through the magazine I interviewed David Brenner and Henny Youngman and that was my first connection to comedians. Then I was an intern at Comic Relief. When I was in college, they did their first benefit, and I worked it for free. Afterwards, they said, “Do you want to stay on?” They paid me like two hundred dollars a week and then after two–three years I got it up to four hundred dollars a week. I was writing jokes for comics on the side and before I knew it I’m like, Oh my God, I’m making like eight hundred dollars a week—half from Comic Relief and half just writing jokes. And it was the same thing. I was around people that I could watch.
Spike: From the time I was thirteen, I was so into the BMX and skate worl
d—that was like the comedy world to me—but I kept thinking, That’s not a job. You know, I’ve got to go to college and get a real job. But it was the thing that I loved. Getting to work on the thing that you’re always thinking about anyways is like the biggest—that’s the goal.
Judd: What did your parents think of you going deep into the BMX world?
Spike: My mom was very encouraging, I think, because she saw how excited I was about it.
Judd: She recognized that sense of fun.
Spike: Yeah, I think so. I think she trusted me. Looking back, I had a point of view about what things meant to me and she saw that. Like if you’re told that something should be taken seriously, you should try and figure out why before you take it seriously. I always wanted to know why before I believed something.
Judd: The thing I was thinking when you were talking was when we were young, there was no Internet. When I was interested in a subject—like, oh, I wonder what happened to Lenny Bruce—I would have to go to the library and get out the microfiche. Today, kids are so savvy. All that information is just sitting there. You can look up Martin Scorsese and watch hundreds of interviews with him. But we were really in the fucking woods. If you wanted to know something, it was hard to find out. Like, I didn’t even see a picture of USC before I went there. I didn’t visit. There were no photos. Where would you get a photo of it? You’d have to write a letter: “Can you send me a brochure of USC?” My parents didn’t even know what I did at school. I filled out all my applications. Like today, if you have a kid, you’re there constantly. You’re so deep in their lives. But my parents didn’t know what the hell I was doing, most of the time. Was that what your experience was like?
Spike: Yeah, but my mom was really encouraging in wanting me to work at this BMX shop in Rockville or to go on tour, or letting me move out to California. She was super-supportive of it. But, yeah, I’d be gone for three months on summer tour and she wouldn’t know where I was.
Judd: I would never think to do that in a million years. My daughter’s sixteen. The idea of shipping her out…But I did the same thing. I would just jump on the train and go to Poughkeepsie to interview Weird Al Yankovic. I didn’t know where I was. I used to go to the city by myself all the time when I was fifteen.
Spike: My dad lived in New York so I would go back and forth. I went to school a little bit in New York and, yeah, by the time I was ten, I was wandering around the city by myself all the time.
Judd: That’s when the city was dangerous.
Spike: We got mugged in Central Park. I’d get chased on my BMX bike. But also, going back to the idea of—one of the things I got from working in the bike shop and just being a part of skateboarding in general is that everything—and I would have never known this intellectually at the time—but in skateboarding, the city is a playground. The city is for you to reinvent. You’re looking at it in a different way than everybody else is. You’re looking at handrails in a different way. The things that people might sit on to have lunch, the ledges, you’re looking at what you can do, tricks you can do or lines you can do and everything is to be invented.
Judd: Is skateboard culture progressive? Because it seems like there are so many artists that come out of it. Like, I love Mike Mills. There’s so many others, too—Templeton and all of the Beautiful Losers artists. Is that part of what they’re taking from that culture?
Spike: There’s no one way to do skateboarding. It is athletic but it is also really creative. It’s a very individual, individual-minded thing. And especially in the eighties or early nineties, when it wasn’t that popular. It wasn’t on TV. It didn’t have the X Games. We didn’t have skate parks. You had to go out of your way to be a part of it.
Judd: No tennis player or baseball player has ever directed a good movie. I mean, it is interesting when you think about how many filmmakers and artists come out of skateboard culture and zero come out of football, baseball, tennis, soccer. It’s not part of any other sport.
Spike: I think it’s—there’s a number of things. One is that you’re not told how to skate. In other sports, somebody’s telling you: “This is the way to do things.” There’s a discipline to it. In skateboarding, you create your own discipline. You’re in a bank parking lot with your friends at night and you keep throwing yourself down a set of stairs trying to land a trick. Your friends are skating, too, and you are all supporting each other, but you keep slamming and getting up because you want that feeling of mastering it and rolling away. There’s no coach. Also, and this is in other sports, too, when you’re trying to land a trick, the methodology of getting that—it’s like this sort of OCD thing, where you’re getting closer and closer every time you flick the board. The way you’re sort of visualizing your body doing it. I remember being about seventeen or eighteen and there was this kid Matt Hoffman, who is this amazing BMXer. We are great friends and used to travel together and shoot photos a lot. He’s probably one of the most notable BMX guys. He invented so much. He was the first guy to ever think of building a mega-ramp and almost killed himself learning to ride it. He told me about the idea of visualizing a trick and he never read it anywhere, he just discovered it. He realized that he had to start picturing in his head what he was going to do because he was inventing stuff that no one had ever done. Once you see somebody else do it, you can do it. But if no one’s ever done it before, you don’t know it can be done. You have to do it in your head and imagine it can be done.
Judd: That’s like thinking you can do a video with a man running on fire that’s shot in twelve seconds and then slow it down and that’s a video. That’s visualizing something that hasn’t been done before.
Spike: We never asked permission.
Judd: Studios today are in a weird position because they want to do the thing that will make the most money but they also know that they need innovation and they have to have something new and exciting for the audience to get them into the theaters.
Spike: And they have a fiscal responsibility to the people giving them the money to make movies. I don’t want to rail against the studios here, because I’m so fortunate and I have friends that work at the studios and I get to work with them and they are real friends and collaborators. But I see what their jobs are and understand the situation they’re in. When I did Where the Wild Things Are, I had so much trouble getting that movie through when I was editing it because it was so not—you know, I think they were expecting a “family film.”
Judd: They thought you were going to do The Grinch.
Spike: Yeah, maybe.
Judd: And when did they find out that they weren’t getting The Grinch?
Spike: About ten months after we shot, I showed them a rough cut, and that’s when they were like, Oh shit. We have to put this in front of an audience right away. I could tell there were things that they were worried about. If somebody’s going to give me money to make a movie, I’m going to be very collaborative with them and listen to their concerns, but it’s also my job to protect the idea of the film because, without that, we’re all lost.
Judd: When you were making it, did you think, like, Oh, if I do this correctly it will connect in some deep way and reach a certain amount of people, or did you think, I have this idea and I’m lucky enough to be able to do it, so let’s go?
Spike: I want the studio to make their money back and I want to be able to make movies in the future. And when I’m making a movie, I want to be responsible and listen to the concerns of the people who gave me the money. But at a certain point, I have to put that all out of my mind because it’s not the responsibility of that movie. That movie’s responsibility is to be true to itself. If I don’t get to make another movie, I’ll make something else. I’ll make a movie for a million dollars. I’ll go write a short story. I’ll go write a book. I believe that. I mean, if I’m put to the test, I hope it’s true. I hope it’s not just a romantic idea.
Judd: That approach frees you up to be as creative as possible because you’re not completely reli
ant on Hollywood or the studio system to keep you working.
Spike: With Where the Wild Things Are, there was a point where I was told, during the editing process, that they were worried about what the movie was and the problem was also it was financed by multiple companies, so—
Judd: They all wanted their say?
Spike: They were all nervous about—
Judd: Isn’t that the worst, when you can sense that jobs are on the line? I’ve made movies and then the next year people have been fired and it’s not necessarily because of your movie, but you’re definitely a part of what brought down the administration. When we did The Cable Guy, Sony had had a few bad movies in a row and then, suddenly, everybody was gone.
Spike: I feel like even if they’re going to lose their jobs they can’t possibly care about the movie as much as I do. And they can’t possibly go to the lengths that I’ll go to protect it. With every film, I’m so grateful that they made my movie and I will extend myself to keep the conversation open and hear their thoughts. But with Wild Things, there was a point where it started to feel abusive. There was a point where I said to somebody at the studio that I was working with, whom I’m actually close friends with now, I was like, “If I came to you and talked to you about your child the way you’re talking to me about my movie right now, you wouldn’t listen to me. If I came to you and said, ‘Man, your kid is fucked up. He’s a problem child and he is freaking me and everyone out. I think you should put him on medication. You know, he’s really a fucked-up kid,’ you’re never going to listen to me because I’m judging your kid and I clearly don’t like or get your kid. But if you came to me and said, ‘Your kid is really special. I see how special he is. I sat and talked to him the other day and what he was talking about was amazing. But there’s a school that might be better for him than the school that he’s in right now and I’ll go visit it with you if you want…,’ that’s a different thing. I’ll listen to you.”
Judd: It takes a long time to find the people who get what you do. The first half of my career, I was always at war with people. We would fight and scream and curse and cry and I was a terror because people didn’t understand what I was trying to do. They were so mad at me, like I was letting them down. Because Freaks and Geeks didn’t have more viewers or The Ben Stiller Show wasn’t beating 60 Minutes. But The Ben Stiller Show was up against 60 Minutes at seven-thirty on a Sunday! It was an edgy sketch show but they, you know, you get into these battles because either they feel you’re unimportant or they feel like you’re not doing what they want you to do. And then finally you find someone that gets your joke and so you make Superbad and then you say, “Hey, I’ve got another one. Do you want to do Pineapple Express?” and they say, “Yeah.” And suddenly you’re in this great rhythm with a studio because they get your tone. They got the joke. With comedy, as soon as you succeed, you have some credibility and then they trust you more. It must be much more extreme with you because you’re doing things that are always very new to the studio. You have a track record of succeeding doing something that’s completely original, but yet it must also scare them because you are reinventing the wheel every time out.