First, writer/director Judd Apatow told us the story of a man who didn't lose his virginity until he reached the age of 40 in the appropriately titled comedy movie The 40 Year Old Virgin. Now, Apatow's taking the whole sex theme one step further with Knocked Up, an R-rated comedy about the consequences of a drunken one-night stand.
Tackling the Issue of Unplanned Pregnancy: Seth Rogen and Katherine Heigl play strangers who hook up for one night only to learn 8 weeks later that they are going to be parents. Apatow wanted the conversations about Katherine Heigl’s character’s unexpected pregnancy to ring as true as possible. “From the very beginning we knew we wanted to have a moment where Seth and his idiotic stoner friends debate abortion. We actually improvised for five hours, these guys debating the issue. Some of it you will see on the DVD. And it’s very, very funny, but really shocking and disturbing. It may have killed Jerry Falwell (laughing). It may be, I think that that he knew it was out there and he just could not handle it. But it is part of the movie, because the movie is about two people trying to decide how they are going to handle the fact that a baby is coming. The first decision you make is, ‘Am I going to keep the baby?’
Part of what is interesting to me is that it’s two people trying to do the right thing and keep the baby. They are trying to decide if they ever could like each other, which is probably something most people don’t do and that’s what hopefully makes it an original concept. I am pro choice and I don’t think anyone should tell anyone else what to do with their bodies or their points of view. I think those decisions are very personal and no one has the answer, so I am pretty solid in that position. But, I also think it’s a very interesting story when you decide not to get an abortion. I am also kind of surprised that it’s shocking to people that they don’t get an abortion because some people say, ‘Wouldn’t they just get an abortion?’ Is it so weird that in this day and age that people are uncomfortable doing that? So, everyone has their own take on it and subjective view on it."
Pushing That R Rating: Apatow just goes for it in Knocked Up, showing the delivery - and the crown - from multiple angles. “In terms of the comedy in terms of what I’ll show or what I won’t show, I just want it to seem real. So the reason that I show the crowning shot is if I don’t, if I don’t show it I just look like an episode of Friends and I am trying to make you feel the pain of that that experience. Because it is the most intense moment in people’s lives and I had to do something that hadn’t been done before. My original goal was to find a woman who would allow me to shoot the baby coming out and then match it into Katherine – the same sheets, the same bed. We got close to getting it done, but here’s why we weren’t allowed to…and this is interesting. The state of California says you can’t do that because the unborn child would need a worker’s permit and I can’t get it till he’s born. There is a Kurt Vonnegut problem right there. So, we weren’t able to do it, so it became a prosthetic.”
Apparently the MPAA didn’t have a problem with Apatow’s film. Apatow joked, “They called me and said, ‘We love it!’ No, I think it’s fine. They show it on the Discovery channel five times a day on A Babies Story, which every time I see my wife watching, I know it means she wants to get pregnant.”
Working with Seth Rogen: “I met Seth when he was 16 years old and he was in Vancouver,” explained Apatow. “Someone gave me a tape of actors reading generic scenes for Freaks and Geeks and Seth was really funny and he seemed real. I was looking for kids who seemed authentic. We wrote this scene where a kid is explaining how he’s going to grow pot underground and then if the cops come, he’s going to blow the entrance and then they’ll just see the corn at ground level and he’ll just say he’s a corn farmer. But Seth [in a deep voice] talked like this and he was really deep, and he did the whole scene really pissed off. It made me laugh so hard and there was no part for him, and we just created a part in the show. And then he moves down to do the show and he brings his parents and I realize I’ve completely altered his entire life because now his whole family lives in America because we find him humorous. But he was so funny when we did the show. You could just see that the light was on him and when we would improvise, he would say things that only a great comic mind would think of.
Even though he was 16 years old, it was like he was born as a fully-formed comedic personality. So when that got cancelled and we did Undeclared, I thought, ‘Well, I’ll make him a writer. Now he was 18 and he will tell me if things are not accurate to the experience of an 18-year-old, even though he didn’t go to college because he did Freaks and Geeks and I had ruined his life that way. I’d ended his education. And then after that, he was having trouble getting work and he wasn’t getting any acting work. A lot of people who are super funny, they don’t fit into any category so he went pretty much half a decade not getting cast. But in that time we were writing these scripts like Superbad and The Pineapple Express. He wrote a script called Drillbit Taylor that we have coming out in the spring. He was working really hard on his writing and in my head I thought sooner or later we’re going to get one of these movies made and he’s going to star in them.
It’s been really funny and he’s really easy to work with. We’re in enough of the same wavelength that we never fight. We’ll start fighting now that he’s a big star. Now’s the moment where it all caves in and we’re like Martin and Lewis. You know, he’s like one of my great friends and it’s all been really easy. We laugh hard all day long and it’s a very pleasant experience. I’m really proud of him because it’s not like everybody in town thought this would happen. So to see him actually pull it all off is very exciting.”
Page 2: On the DVD Extras, Cirque du Soleil, and Walk Hard
