Babies on Demand: There’s a waiting room scene in Knocked Up where all the dad’s friends are patiently waiting out the delivery. Apatow explained how he staged the scene which is loaded with babies: “Well, I just filled a room with babies and just positioned them in the room. Some are the babies of crewmembers and some are babies that are baby actors. There is a whole world of baby actors that you don’t know about. If I needed a baby this afternoon, I could get a baby if I had the money to act with. There are some very nice people who have twins and if one is crying, then you bring in the other one. We are always very careful with them, because at some level it’s odd there is a baby there and it feels wrong. We try to shoot them very quickly and then have them leave. Especially when the baby is born and they are handed the baby, it’s difficult, because you want a baby that’s teeny, because it would look weird if a baby came out and was talking. And then you are scared to even have to hold the baby. The guy who delivers the baby, Ken Jeong, is actually a doctor in real life and he was terrified holding this little baby - even though he knows how to do it.”
Apatow Promises a Loaded Knocked Up 2-Disc DVD: “The DVD there’s going to be a one- and a two-disc version released at the same time sometime in the winter time and we just have so many extras that it’s ridiculous. It’s taken so much time to watch them. They’ve literally handed me DVDs with 6 hours of footage that I have to go through.
One thing we did that I think is really funny is we shot a fake documentary during the making of the movie, and the documentary is about how Seth Rogen was the tenth choice to play the lead. So during our shoot we would have actors come and perform a scene and then I would fire them. We had James Franco do it, Justin Long, David Krumholtz, Allen Covert. I did it. There was a moment where I think I should be the lead as an actor/director. Orlando Bloom did it. It’s really funny. It’s this whole documentary about hard it was to find Seth.
We also did a very funny fake documentary about how I was having fights with the studio so they sent in Bennett Miller, the director of Capote, to oversee the shoot. And so Bennett came to the set and we would shoot all this footage of him changing my angles and my coverage and debating me. It’s very funny. I keep talking about how I don’t like moving the camera because it’s bad for the comedy and he says, ‘Do you think it’s funnier ‘cause it looks like s**t?’ (Laughing) And it ultimately comes to blows between me and Bennett Miller.
We really went out of our way to make a DVD that takes a lot of comedic chances. There’s a very funny documentary about the roller coaster sequence because Jay Baruchel didn’t want to do it, because he says he gets panic attacks on roller coasters. The documentary is about me manipulating him into doing it. You see me basically lying to him saying, ‘It’s not that bad,’ and then him having a panic attack on the roller coaster. And then he won’t do it again and we have to keep doing it all day. Then you see – because most people want to see this – most of our actors vomiting over and over. It’s just a funny little 5-minute documentary. In addition to deleted scenes, there’s a ton of deleted scenes and raw footage, I like to put just the raw takes on the DVD because I think it’s fun to see our process.”
Getting Cirque du Soleil to Sign On: Surprisingly, Apatow didn’t have a problem getting the acclaimed dance troupe to say yes to Knocked Up. “Cirque du Soleil was fantastic to us,” said Apatow. “We had this idea. I’d written Cirque du Soleil into movies before and for one reason or another it never seemed to survive the rewrites. I always knew that there was a great comedy sequence to be done with Cirque du Soleil and I was frankly very surprised that it hadn’t already been done. There’s very few things that are fresh that are that popular. So when we sent them the pages, they were very, very receptive. They got the joke and were very comfortable with it because it is about guys doing mushrooms at Cirque du Soleil but it didn’t seem to bother them. They got the joke.
We went to all the shows and tried to figure out which show would look right for the sequence. And then when we went there, for an entire day they performed the show just for our cameras and about 900 extras. It really couldn’t have been easier. It’s the kind of thing that you would think would be incredibly difficult to accomplish, but theirs is just such a well-run operation that they made it all easy. I’m really proud of the sequence. It gets really big laughs, and I’ve been to all of those shows a billion times. We all went to the Love show the weekend that we shot that sequence. ...I’m very thankful to them. Then later I found out that the woman who was in charge of approving everything babysat me when I was 8 years-old. Isn’t that odd? She was my babysitter, now she’s head of public relations for Cirque du Soleil.”
Up Next – Lots of Projects: “Well I wrote a movie. We have Superbad coming out August 17th, which is a movie that Seth wrote with his partner, Evan Goldberg. It’s a high school comedy and it’s a really hilarious movie that I think is going to be really, really popular at the end of the summer. It’s truly one of the funniest movies I’ve ever been a part of or near. It just works. It stars Jonah Hill who’s in Knocked Up and Michael Cera from Arrested Development. Seth and Bill Hader play cops in it and it’s just funny. It’s about one insane night in high school, the last week of high school, and Greg Mottola, the director of The Daytrippers, he directed it.
And then I just finished a movie that I wrote with Jake Kasdan and Jake directed it. It’s called Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story and that is a goof on movies like Ray and Walk the Line and Selena and Great Balls of Fire. It’s about the long hard walk of Dewey Cox. He’s been addicted to a lot of drugs. He’s gone through a lot of wives and when he was a kid, he accidentally cut his brother in half with a machete. He’s working out these problems in this movie and we’re very sure it’s going to win an Oscar. We’re pretty sure that it’s a shoe-in at this point.”
