The Origin of “40 Year Old Virgin:” “[Steve Carell] mentioned that while doing ‘Anchorman,’ there’s a character he liked and I liked the idea that he was surrounded by younger people giving terrible advice. So we just started sitting down and outlining together and trying to figure out what the story would be. And we very quickly agreed that we wanted to have it be, hopefully, be really funny, but ultimately be a sweet story about a guy growing up. Like a middle-aged coming of age story. So we started outlining before we started writing. And then we had this idea that he dates this woman who is actually a grandmother, so he goes from not having any responsibility with a woman to being in the most committed relationship on Earth with Catherine Keener.”
Torturing Steve Carell and Improv on the Set: “We shot a scene where we waxed his body, so we put four cameras on him and literally waxed his chest and we didn’t have much of a script there. ‘Say what you will say if someone ripped off huge patches of your hair.’ Which is funny ‘cause when people see it and they think it’s a special effects, but it isn’t. He was bleeding on camera.
We did a speed dating set piece with a lot of funny people. Mo Collins was in it from “Mad TV” and Gillian Vigman was really, really funny. The woman who wrote that Matt and Ben play, Mindy [Kaling] - she’s got a pilot this year - [plays] Paul Rudd’s ex-girlfriend, who he is semi-stalking [him], who is really funny. My wife Leslie Mann plays a drunk girl he picks up at a bar and he thinks he can lose his virginity, which leads to a very long, intricate drunk driving sequence. And Dave Koechner did a cameo in our sequence where they go to a family planning center and he plays someone’s father. No Will [Ferrell]. We didn’t bother Will.”
Collaborating with Steve Carell: “We just sat together and talked through the entire movie for a long time. Then we wrote it really fast after talking about it for many months. They greenlit it very fast after our first draft and then we started re-writing.
What I like to do is to have a rough script and start casting very early, and then doing major re-writes because I know Paul Rudd’s in it, Romany [Malco’s] in it, and Catherine Keener, because it changes so much of the movie. And it’s always weird that people don’t rewrite for the actor. Every time I’ve done a television show, I’ve always cast actors sometimes even before I finished the script and then I write everything in their voice so that’s a lot of what we did. We did some rehearsals in December with the actors. Like in the beginning of December we did rehearsals six weeks before we were shooting so we could tailor everything to these people.”
On Where the Characters Came From: “I wish I couldn’t say it was my most personal work. In my head, I always think of it as ‘Freaks and Geeks’ if none of them got laid, or if one of them didn’t have sex. This might be where they would be at 40 years old. Bill Haverchuck [played by Martin Starr] if he didn’t do it.”
What Fans Can Expect from the “40 Year Old Virgin” DVD: “We have stuff for that. Every once in a while, you would push something too far. We do a lot of stuff for the DVD. We actually hired an editor just to cut deleted scenes and an uncensored cut of the movie.”
