Taking Judd Apatow Seriously

Judd Apatow is working much harder on this article than I am. He wants to meet at 8 a.m., suggests six different events I can accompany him to and sends me more e-mails checking on my progress than my editor does. The two-minute video interview that I promised Time.com turns into Apatow taking my camera, directing me for 15 minutes and editing it himself. It’s not entirely surprising–after all, I’m lazy–but it helps explain how Apatow has become the most influential person making comedy in Hollywood. Partly it’s that he’s funny. But mostly it’s that talent is far less important to him than hard work. We like to think of comedians as people who throw out quips from behind a martini (Dorothy Parker) or a bong (Tommy Chong). But if Horatio Alger had written tales about boys who labored tirelessly to fulfill their dream of making movies full of penis jokes, he would have written about Apatow.

After he struggled for two decades in the worlds of stand-up comedy, television and movies, Apatow’s plugging away suddenly paid off: he broke out as the creator of a genre of foulmouthed straight-man-love movies–the bromance. The first movie he directed, 2005’s The 40 Year-Old Virgin, earned more than four times its cost at the U.S. box office. This enabled Apatow to produce all the scripts he’d been studiously stockpiling, making seven movies in 2007 and ’08–Knocked Up (which he also directed), Superbad, Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Drillbit Taylor, Step Brothers and Pineapple Express–and inspiring a slew of imitators. He was the first to show that our porn- and profanity-saturated culture is actually underpinned by churchgoing morals. Crudeness became a cover for sensitivity; he created a generation of Alan Aldas who talk like frat boys. Compared with the comedies that dominated the 1990s–movies by the Farrelly brothers, Jim Carrey and Adam Sandler in which over-the-top characters triumph over an evil dumb guy–Apatow’s movies are bildungsromans in which low-key guys push aside their comic books and triumph over themselves. Imagine Porky’s if, instead of getting revenge on the strip club, Pee Wee and Meat had a long talk about life goals, met nice girls and raised children.

Apatow’s new movie, Funny People, is the one he hopes will turn him from a mass producer of comedies into a filmmaker. It has a tragic premise: Sandler plays a lonely, selfish comedian who has received a terminal-disease diagnosis. It’s got no set piece to assure laughs–no chest-waxing like in Virgin, no crowning baby like in Knocked Up. It’s complicated enough that it’s the first movie Apatow has made that has a bad title, a bad poster and bad commercials. And if it doesn’t do well, the creative freedom he has earned from studios could come to an end.

But for Apatow, the goal was simple. “I wanted to see how funny I could be without making the choice that every 10 minutes something big and visual had to happen,” he says. “People like the comedy more when they care about the characters. That’s what I learned from the last two movies. This movie is just taking that one step further.” For all his sex-drenched crudeness, for all the e-mails he sends me worrying about ulcers, Apatow is a bouncy, way-too-happily married dad who wants his audiences to know how great life is. And, more important, to remind himself.

The Comedy Nerd

Because Apatow is a guy who can get into his own head, set up an office there and really go to work. A bearded 41-year-old in a uniform of striped short-sleeved Izods, he makes a lot of eye contact, has a friendly, nervous laugh and constantly plays with his right thumb. He seems more like a therapist than someone who sees one. But behind the approachable attitude, Apatow is superintense. He is rarely far from a Red Bull. On the nights he doesn’t use sleeping pills, often the only way he can fall asleep is to listen to meditation courses on his iPod. He reads self-help books and rarely uses the words project or idea, greatly preferring the term problem. He’s been racked with back pain and had a long bout with severe panic attacks; he’ll still sit only on the aisle in a theater, in case he flips out and has to leave abruptly.

Almost all that neurotic energy has gone into his work. The child of divorced parents on Long Island, New York, he lived in a different home than his two siblings did and spent a lot of time–as in from 3 p.m. to 11 p.m. every day–watching television. As a kid, he’d push his tape recorder against the TV so he could transcribe every episode of Saturday Night Live. At his high school radio station, he wangled interviews with comedians like Jerry Seinfeld, Jay Leno and Steve Allen; at 15 he started doing stand-up at clubs. He’s such a giant comedy nerd that after proudly playing me snippets of his Garry Shandling interview from high school, he takes me into his office in his huge Pacific Palisades, Calif., house to show off a collection of autographed photos he just bought in New York–Sonny and Cher, Siskel and Ebert, Barbara Eden. Then there’s the album of autographs he sent away for as a kid that includes a surprising number of headshots of Paul Lynde. It’s as if Apatow invited me over hoping I’d beat him up.

After high school, Apatow moved to Los Angeles to go to USC but dropped out after two years to focus on his stand-up act. He was tight with Sandler, Carrey and David Spade but came to feel that he couldn’t compete with them onstage. So he started writing jokes for Tom Arnold and Roseanne Barr and, after approaching Ben Stiller in line at an Elvis Costello concert, took the helm of the Fox sketch comedy The Ben Stiller Show at the age of 24. There Apatow surprised everyone with his confidence and willingness to fight with network executives. “He burned bridges. He was not afraid,” says Stiller. “He had the courage of his convictions. I don’t know where he got that from. I was like, ‘This is great, but maybe that sketch about the Weird Tales of the Dark Side where I turn into a monster for eight minutes isn’t the greatest thing in the world.’ But he would be like, ‘No. Come on. We’re doing it.'”

He fought even harder as an executive producer of Freaks and Geeks, the critically acclaimed high school series created by his friend Paul Feig, which lasted only one season. When Apatow’s next show, the sitcom Undeclared, was canceled, he sent a messenger to the Fox executive responsible–the same guy who canceled The Ben Stiller Show–with a copy of a positive review from Time and a note expressing his disbelief in extremely graphic terms.

Apatow was equally persevering in his personal life. He met his wife Leslie Mann, who co-stars with Sandler and Seth Rogen in Funny People, on the set of The Cable Guy. “I didn’t think I would date him. I thought I’d send him on dates with my friends,” she says during a Funny People recording session on their 15th wedding anniversary, which she and Apatow later celebrated by seeing The Hangover. “But he’d send his sister to keep telling me all the women he was dating. It was all part of his plan.”

The Feedback Machine

For all his master planning, Apatow as a moviemaker is known for his collaboration. His least favorite part of the process is writing, which for Funny People involved his speaking the characters’ parts into a tape recorder. Even then, he’d call people for feedback. “The moment you think of a joke is the best moment,” he says. “I put on a big show when I write something I think is funny. I’ll talk about it a lot and call people and tell them, ‘I thought of this joke where Steve Carell pees in his own face.’ I’ll talk about it like I cured a disease.”

The real writing starts after casting, when Apatow re-creates his characters based on the actors. He’s not interested in having anyone do a Meryl Streep–like transformation. “Initially my character in Sarah Marshall was an English author, a bookworm character,” says Russell Brand, the English comedian who played a rock star in the movie. “Eventually it was decided that no one could expect me to do any actual acting. I think he’s very interested in truth, so he has a good intuition about people’s essence.” Sean (Diddy) Combs co-stars in next year’s Apatow-produced Get Him to the Greek, in which Jonah Hill has to transport Brand’s rock-star character to a gig at the Greek Theater in L.A. “I prepared the script like any audition,” Combs says. “When I walked in, they took my script and said, ‘You won’t even need that.'”

On the set of every movie he produces, Apatow makes the director shoot and keep shooting, yelling suggestions at the actors until they’re so worn down that they can’t think of anything to say other than something personal–or funny. After a scene in Get Him to the Greek, director Nick Stoller runs off triumphantly, shaking his fists in the air. “We did it! We got Sean to make a gay joke!” he yells. “They got me. They turned me out,” says Combs, shaking his head as he walks away. One night, with 1,300 extras at the Greek Theater at 11 o’clock, Apatow suggests yet another shoot of Brand’s rock performance with pyrotechnics. He enlists his favorite argument: “Maybe it’ll show up in the DVD extras.”

Once Apatow has a three-hour-plus version of the movie, he shows it to every funny person in L.A. and asks for notes. “Judd is like a feedback machine,” says Feig. “He wants feedback of the person he doesn’t even like or trust. And he’s got the brain trust of comedy at the moment, old and new.” The next stop is test audiences–10 for Funny People. “We had a debate over how much is too much for a comedian to talk about his penis and testicles,” Apatow says. “The answer there is, No amount is too much for an audience. The F-word count is at Goodfellas levels. People are waiting for David Mamet’s name in the credits.”

Then Apatow gets back inside his own head and agonizes over the final details. On the last day to make changes to the Funny People print, he is sitting in the office building in Santa Monica, Calif., that his assistants call the Apatower, mulling over which of several jokes to put in. One dilemma: Should Sandler dislike Mann’s elder daughter because she doesn’t laugh at his jokes or because she’s old enough to have her period? Mind you, this is Apatow’s real daughter who’s playing the character–so when he asks me, as a warm body in the room, for my opinion, I keep quiet. On the last day of sound-editing, I suffer through a painful hour in which Apatow can’t decide on the third song during the closing credits–which no one in the theater will stay long enough to hear, other than maybe the people in the room who are making this decision.

These people tend to be familiar faces. Apatow gravitates toward the same editors, directors and actors–a community, population 30 or so, known as Apatown. After Freaks and Geeks was canceled, he hired Rogen, an actor on the show, to write for Undeclared. “I don’t think he even cared if any of us could write,” Rogen says. “He just cared that we wanted to write and figured he could shape us into writers.” Stoller, another young writer on Undeclared, was hired by Apatow to direct Forgetting Sarah Marshall despite having no directorial experience. Andy Dick, who got his start on The Ben Stiller Show, has had small roles in a handful of Apatow’s projects. “Judd has given me a chance from when I was a nobody to when I have publicly reduced myself to being less than a nobody by my public, drunken, stupid-ass shenanigans. I literally started crying when he told me he wanted me to do a part in Funny People,” says Dick, who indeed starts crying. “Everybody in this town is worried about who they associate with. Nobody is that good.”

Apatow often serves as a mentor to the young people in his comedy troupe. The advice he hands out is exactly what he learned from watching Carrey and Sandler: They succeeded by writing their own movies to star in, so start typing. He barely knew Jonah Hill, now 25, when he hooked him up with a scriptwriting deal. “I was living at home, getting my tonsils taken out, and I was getting an e-mail from Judd saying, Here’s your Universal movie deal. Now write down 100 ideas,” says Hill. “My parents were like, ‘Is this guy touching you?'”

Jason Segel, another Freaks and Geeks alum, says Apatow told him he was too weird to get cast in roles he didn’t write for himself, so Segel turned his own breakup into Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Years earlier, on the Freaks set, Apatow instructed Segel to write the sad love song his character was supposed to sing and play on guitar. “This was Wednesday, and we’re going to film on Friday,” says Segel. “I said, ‘But Judd, I don’t know how to play guitar.’ He said, ‘You have until Friday. You’ll figure it out.'” And Segel did. “It’s sort of like having a great sensei from one of those old karate movies,” he says. “He’s like Mr. Miyagi. You don’t know why you’re doing ‘wax on, wax off,’ and he says, Show me ‘wax on, wax off’–then you’ve sold a script.”

“He Likes People”

The thing about the people Apatow mentors is that they’re all men. His films are about men growing up and men helping men grow up and men being just shy of gay as they tease one another about being gay as they help one another grow up. There are smart, successful women in the movies, but other than his wife, they never join the troupe. “We’re all really uncomfortable around girls, for the most part,” says Rogen. “I imagine that has something to do with it.” This annoys a lot of critics, male and female, as well as some viewers, but Apatow insists the female roles in his movies are just as real as the male ones. He’s producing films written by and starring Kristen Wiig and Charlyne Yi; if those movies have lots of women calling one another lesbians and making self-deprecating vagina jokes, then Apatow can check off one more box on his self-improvement list.

All his characters, after all, strive to be better people. “There’s a thread going all the way from Freaks and Geeks to Funny People,” says Shandling, for whom Apatow worked as a writer on The Larry Sanders Show in the mid-’90s. “That philosophy is, We’re all doing the best we can in life. It isn’t easy. It’s just a little funnier than Buddha Buddhism.” When I ask Apatow if he sees himself having a career like those of two filmmakers known for the dramedy mode–Woody Allen and James L. Brooks, who made Terms of Endearment and Broadcast News–he gets way more excited about the Brooks comparison. “Woody Allen isn’t very hopeful about human beings,” he says. “Jim Brooks is hopeful. He likes people.”

Funny People is the first time he’s put his philosophy front and center. The 40 Year-Old Virgin was an idea Steve Carell had from doing improv. Knocked Up drew on Apatow’s experiences of becoming a father, but it borrowed heavily from Rogen’s foulmouthed stoner worldview. This was the knock against Apatow, which he mocked in a famous heated e-mail exchange with Mark Brazill, a co-creator of That ’70s Show, who accused him of stealing one of his ideas for a Ben Stiller Show sketch and then wished cancer on him. Apatow wrote, “As for the cancer, I’ll wait till you get it and then steal it from you. By the way, that joke was one of my writers’, Rodney Rothman (see, I credited him).” When Apatow asks me how I’m doing with this article and I tell him I’ve been stymied by laziness, he sends me an e-mail that reads, “The reason you are having trouble is the same reason why I quit stand-up–I am not that interesting.”

But in Funny People his life gets some screen time. The movie starts with 20-year-old clips Apatow shot of Sandler, his then roommate, making prank calls. “It was like the old days when we lived together, except my trailer smelled better,” Sandler says. The story is about an experience with a friend’s sickness that Apatow, usually so open about his life, refuses to talk about. In the movie he has something very clear to say, which in its Shel Silverstein essence is that happiness comes from selflessness and living in the present, not from burying yourself in work.

That idea does not come naturally to Apatow. “I would look through a journal from 12 years ago, and it would say, ‘You work too hard. Take some time off. You should work out. Go to Europe,'” he says. “I stopped writing in a diary because it became so repetitive.” So now he says he’s taking his first year off. “If I go right back to working, then I seem like a crazy person who didn’t learn the lesson of his own movie,” he says. “You want overlap so if this one bombs, you’re already on production as a safety net. But I’m trying to see if I have the courage to sit in that empty space and ponder.”

When I tell Rogen about Apatow’s planned sabbatical, he just laughs. “What year–2030? He’s got this movie to promote, then Get Him to the Greek is in postproduction and then two movies he’s producing,” he says. “He may say that, but he’ll write a movie during that time.” I think Rogen underestimates Apatow’s work ethic. I’m betting he writes nothing. And that his back kills him.

Judd Shoots Joel To see Apatow grill Stein about his chances of being on the cover, go to time.com/apatow_cover