Sick in the Head: Conversations About Life and Comedy (30 page)

Judd:
What was the worst?

Larry:
We are about to see a clip from
Tootsie
, which was a difficult process.

Judd:
A very painful process. Even though it’s combative to make a movie like
Tootsie
, can you enjoy the final product and see that something good
came of it? Or do you watch and think,
There are still things that are wrong?

Larry:
I know things are wrong. There’s one scene—I don’t know how it got past continuity, but it depicted a night that was at least four weeks long. That kills me.

Judd:
So
Tootsie
irritates you? It delights us and irritates you. Should we skip the clip? What do we do?

Larry:
Oh, I don’t care. You can play it or not.

Judd:
What specifically about the process was so painful?

Larry:
It was a battle of egos and wills and I just withdrew from the combat—which is to say, I was fired. It’s better left undiscussed.

Judd:
All right, well, let’s watch it. Do you want to watch it?

Larry:
I’ll sit here and look at it. I’ll watch it.

(Clip from
Tootsie:
Michael Dorsey tells his manager, George Fields, that he needs to get off the show.)

Judd:
We love it.

Larry:
I didn’t say it wasn’t wonderful.

Judd:
What was your reaction the first time you saw it?

Larry:
I saw it in a screening and I whispered to Sydney Pollack, “Can you get Jessica Lange out of the picture?” She went on to win the Academy Award, of course, which shows you how smart I am. It was a mix—it’s still a mixed bag of feelings.

Judd:
Who are other comedy writers-directors that you admire who are currently working today?

Jim:
I just always think, whenever I see anybody else’s work, how tough it is to get it right. It’s so hard to get the opportunity these days to do a film you care about—that you want to make and somebody lets you. Anybody who gets that, for starters, I like. And when it’s pulled off, it’s just extraordinary.

Judd:
I remember there was an event at the Museum of Television and Radio where you talked a little bit about honoring your characters, and I found that inspiring as I was heading into writing
Knocked Up.
Can you speak a little bit about that, the characters you’re creating?

Jim:
When I just saw
Tootsie
—you know, I understand it’s genuine and deeply felt, but it’s a mountain of a picture. It’s one of the greatest films ever. And the fact that people walk away not all feeling wonderful shows how tough it is all the time. Almost everything we’re discussing here is about indelible character. I don’t think there’s been a clip where that hasn’t been true. I think the relationship, when it’s allowed to happen, between writers and actors is just—it’s what we’re all there for.

Judd:
How much do you think of the audience when you’re writing—or do you primarily write for yourself and not worry about what they’ll get?

Larry:
I don’t worry about what they’ll get. I write for myself on the assumption that there are a number of people who have similar sensibilities and will appreciate what it is that I thought was good enough to present, not to them but to me.

Jim:
Well, on the ride to the preview, any thought of writing for yourself leaves me. Let me tell you the greatest story about people who genuinely work for themselves: John Cassavetes did a picture called
Husbands
and
Time
magazine called it the greatest film ever made, and you can certainly make the argument for it. They had a scene that took place in a john, which maybe was twenty minutes long. It was Peter Falk, and Cassavetes and—

Larry:
Ben Gazzara.

Jim:
Ben Gazzara. They were pals and they basically started independent film. They were standing at the back of an audience—and I heard this from Cassavetes, this story—and people started leaving the theater during that scene, considering it so awful. And they clapped each other on the back and said, “We did it.” That’s a true story.

Larry:
That’s wonderful.

Jim:
That’s as pure as it is.

Judd:
Larry, can you talk a little about your time working on
Your Show of Shows?

Jim:
And can you say who was on staff, too, Larry?

Larry:
The truth is, I was never on
Your Show of Shows.
I was on
Caesar’s Hour
, which was the next thing that Sid Caesar did after
Your Show of Shows.
At that time, among the writers were Mel Brooks, Mel Tolkin, Neil Simon, and Woody Allen later on. Carl Reiner sat with us every minute. Sid was there, too. What was it like? It was like being in a great jazz band and having these other guys to bounce off and, uh, knowing that you were with the best, knowing you were on the New York Yankees.

Judd:
So you could feel it every day, that this was an all-star team?

Larry:
The individual successes came later, but we just knew that we were the best around. Fame and celebrity were not part of it. It was just knowing you were with a great bunch of guys. There was one woman—Selma Diamond on
Your Show of Shows
, and a woman named Lucille Kallen, who was one of the original writers—but basically it was a boys’ club and it was thrilling but it was tough. I mean, the show was broadcast every Saturday night. We had Sunday off, and Monday morning we said, “What do we do next week?” A season back then was thirty-nine weeks, not twenty-two.

Judd:
How long was the show?

Larry:
Too long. It was an hour live, in front of an audience, of course—no laugh track, no sweetening.

Judd:
Was that the most fun of all the experiences that you had?

Larry:
Well, it was the most fun of that kind of fun.

Judd:
What’s your writing schedule like? How do you work?

Jim:
Why do I experience every question as if I have to confess to something? It’s, uh, I have an erratic daily routine. I always hope for three hours in the morning. I rarely get it.

Larry:
I get up very early, four, five o’clock in the morning. It’s just a sneakier way of living longer, really. And I just sit down at the keyboard and
work on several things. It’s probably better to work on one thing at a time, but you have to keep feeding the beast and hopefully, an outline—yes, I have to outline. I may deviate, you know, find myself inventing a dozen off-ramps, but I have to have a map to start with.

Judd:
I haven’t figured it out. Before I had children I would get up about noon and watch the
Real World: Vegas
marathon and then I would eat some chicken marsala with pasta and then I’d get in this really weird, like almost-high kind of funk from it. And then slowly I’d pull out of it and I’d get like the greatest forty-five minutes of writing done.

Larry:
Things like peeing with a boner?

Judd:
Yeah, all the pride I feel. Let’s go to another clip. We’re closing in on the end of the night so we’re going to go to a clip right now from
As Good as It Gets.
Any introduction?

Jim:
This is a very odd clip, and Mark Andrus, who wrote it with me—Mark wrote the original screenplay and it brought me into a kind of situation that I would never have brought myself into. And this scene is very odd because when you see it you’re not sure if you want any laughs. I hope there are jokes in there, but I’m not necessarily going for that.

(Clip from
As Good as It Gets:
Melvin tells Simon the only reason the dog prefers him is because he keeps bacon in his pocket.)

Judd:
At the time, I heard you did a lot of research on OCD but you also did a lot of work with the idea of the dog and the dog’s personality. Would you like to speak to that?

Jim:
I’m a nut on research. I get very obsessive about it.

Judd:
How do you know when you’ve accomplished everything you set out to accomplish in a film?

Jim:
I don’t know if that’s happened to me yet.

Judd:
Larry, what about you?

Larry:
Now we get into the writer-writer as opposed to the writer-director. As the writer, I’m rarely around at the end of the picture, including the wrap party.

Jim:
Have you seen pictures of yours without wanting to fix something?

Judd:
Well, I shoot an enormous amount of film, and when I’m shooting what I think to myself is,
If I hated this scene in editing, what would I wish I had?
And so as I’m shooting, I’m shooting many permutations of the scene. It might be different lines or alts. If it’s too mean, let me get something a little less mean. If it seems sentimental, I might get something edgy. I usually have like a million feet of film that in my head—I’ve edited every permutation and I’m just flipping things in and out so at the end of it I’m reasonably happy. But I have to say, when I watch it a year or two later, I start seeing issues that haunt me. I don’t think anyone’s ever completely satisfied. Have you ever been completely satisfied? Is there an episode of a show where you think—

Jim:
Sometimes in
Taxi
, yeah.

Judd:
When you watch
Terms of Endearment
now, what bugs you?

Jim:
I haven’t seen it in a long time, but I get knocked out by actors. The thing that keeps me from really hating the experience of seeing these pictures again is that I get lost in the acting.

This interview originally took place as a panel hosted by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

I remember the day someone handed me a DVD of a movie called
Tiny Furniture.
This was during a phase of my life when I was beating myself up for being bad about watching things that people said were important to watch, so I went home and watched it right away, not knowing that the woman in this movie had also written it, directed it, produced it, and shot most of it in her parents’ apartment for forty-five thousand dollars. The movie was hilarious and heartfelt and weird in all the right ways.

Afterward, I emailed her immediately. “Hey,” I wrote, “if you ever need someone to help you screw up your career, call me.” The next day Lena emailed back, thinking that I was one of her friends goofing on her. I soon found out that she had just begun to develop a television show for HBO with my friend Jenni Konner. They asked if I wanted to come on board and help, which led to one of the greatest creative experiences of my life: working on
Girls.

Lena Dunham is one of the few people on earth who I have never gotten into a fight with. Even in the throes of a production, when deadlines are looming and people are exhausted and unpleasant, every moment with her has been a joy.

Judd Apatow:
So.

Lena Dunham:
So.

Judd:
I wanted to ask you where you feel like you’re headed, after accomplishing so much at such a young age. You’re in this position of getting to say a lot with your show and your book and everything else you’re doing. How do you feel about what you’ve been able to express so far?

Lena:
It’s mind-blowing to me. And because so much of the stuff I’ve been able to make is so personal, there’s always the fear that you’re going to run out of gas. But in the past few years, to my surprise, I’ve become more politically and historically engaged, which has given me this whole other area of human stories to explore. I have all this stuff percolating in my head now which, for the first time, isn’t just about me—and that’s an exciting feeling. All of the projects I’m thinking about now, none of them are about a twenty-seven-year-old girl who’s pissed at her mom. They all share my concerns, in a way, but on a different scale and in a different time period. I’m excited by the idea of moving out of super-confessional stuff.

Judd:
When you started, it almost felt like you were writing about your life in real time. But then your actual life started veering pretty dramatically from the character you were writing about.

Lena:
Totally. And my life also became my work, which is the thing I’d always wanted—to be a person who worked so much that I wasn’t even available to go to dinner. It’s not like I’m out on the town every night, collecting crazy new experiences, but I am expanding my brain. I feel so hungry for information. I go home every night and I read like half a book and three magazines and some old articles from the Internet. It reminds me of college, when I would go into the library and check out ten Criterion Collection movies and then watch them all over the weekend. I remember coming out of those weekends, feeling like,
I’m a radically different person than I was on Friday
….

Judd:
What do you think people have taken from
Girls?
Do you allow yourself to think about what kind of impact it may be having?

Lena:
It’s impossible for your own brain to comprehend that other people are seeing this stuff, translating it, analyzing it, outside of your own bedroom or whatever. But I guess the thing that’s most exciting to me is when men, particularly fathers, tell me that the show has allowed them to understand their wives or daughters better. That, to me, is a really moving compliment.

Judd:
I imagine that’s especially true for parents whose daughters are going to college.

Lena:
Yeah, and who feel like,
What is happening to my child? Is she ever going to have a job? And what does her sex life look like?
In a way, my work gives them more things to panic about, but it also gives them a sense, I hope, that she’s part of something. I also like when women tell me that the show made them feel more comfortable and strong both with their body and in their relationships, that it has given them more authority.

Judd:
We thought, in the beginning, that people would have debates about the show, for sure, but I don’t think that we thought there was much of a political statement being made. I first realized the debate would happen in the second episode, when we were talking about whether Jessa was going to get an abortion.

Lena:
Yeah.

Judd:
And I said, maybe she shouldn’t have an abortion in the second episode.

Lena:
Your quote was, “There’s Jerry, there’s George, and then there’s their crazy neighbor Kramer—and you’re having Kramer shoot someone in the face in the second episode. And I’m not saying abortion is like shooting someone in the face, but I am saying we’re asking a lot of the audience if Kramer gets an abortion.”

Judd:
Right. But then, after the first season, when you realized that people were dissecting it and debating it and trying to figure out your politics, it never felt like any of that got in your head or affected your writing. One thing I always tell people is that, when we’re in the writers’ room, all that talk doesn’t affect you negatively. It doesn’t impact the creative process. Why do you think that is?

Lena:
I think it’s because the writers’ room is the place where I feel most comfortable. That’s the safe space. And so I think I was always determined not to lose that. I wish I could be the person who never reads reviews, but I totally check out what’s happening online and I have a pretty good sense of the dialogue around the show. But at the same time, you can’t internalize it. That is just gonna kill whatever is exciting or thrilling or organic about the process. There were definitely times where you and I talked
about trying to respond to criticism that we found frustrating, but doing it in kind of a wink-wink way.

Judd:
Like when we had Donald Glover on the show and you revealed to him that, on some level, you liked dating him
because
he was black.

Lena:
It was thrilling and it added to her image of herself as a liberal woman who came to the city to have certain kinds of experiences.

Judd:
I don’t know if I ever quite landed on what my official position was about making the show more multicultural. Some people say, Well, New York is multicultural but there are plenty of people who go to school and, if they’re Caucasian, they have mostly Caucasian friends. Whether that’s healthy or not, it’s not misrepresenting the world. But what’s really wrong with television is that African American show runners are not being encouraged to create shows. What some networks do is try to make themselves feel better by jamming some “diverse” characters into their shows.

Lena:
What I always say—and it’s kind of my stock answer because I think it’s the true answer—is that I’m grateful that the conversation around diversity is happening, period. We’ve introduced characters of color, and we’ve done it in a time frame that makes sense to us. What was hard is when people were saying, “You’re racist and your family’s racist and look at you and your racist show.” Being assigned a label like that, especially when you consider yourself to be a liberal person, is distressing.

Judd:
I didn’t expect Chinese filmmakers to represent the Jewish nerd experience on Long Island.

Lena:
And you shouldn’t! But what’s interesting is that what people were also responding to—which is a real criticism and one I take seriously—is that, if you look at the show, it doesn’t look like the New York I know. So we’ve been more attentive to that, trying to look at each neighborhood and go, Okay, who lives here and what would it look like and what feels real?

Judd:
So much of the conversation about diversity on TV should be about subscribers and advertisers. If the networks thought they could make more money creating shows with diverse casts they would do it in a second.
They’ve clearly decided there’s not enough money it. Every once in a while they throw a bone to the idea of diversity, but it’s not a high priority.

Lena:
It’s awful and distressing. But as you proved with
Bridesmaids
, the conventional wisdom is often wrong: Women are going to come to movies. And obviously, black people and black women want to see strong characters who reflect them on television, too. And the industry is lagging way behind on what people’s needs are. You have much more of a relationship to the financial and business angle of the industry, because I work at HBO, where there are no ads and I can do whatever I want. But you’ve had the experience of having to satisfy a studio, a network, do test screenings. You understand the machinations behind it.

Judd:
I remember working on a black cop movie.

Lena:
Which one?

Judd:
I shouldn’t say because of the story I’m about to tell. But there was a black character—a gigantic star—and in the movie, he had a romance with another black actress. And I noticed that they never kissed in the movie. I asked about this and the producer said to me, “Yeah. Internationally, people don’t like to see black people kiss.” And you could tell that the black star understood that as well. They were all pandering to cultural prejudices or what they
thought
were cultural prejudices. Which was bullshit, but my jaw still dropped.

Lena:
That is one of the most upsetting things I have ever heard.

Judd:
Yeah, and if you think about it, it’s very real. It’s all of those prejudices—like people say comedies don’t work in Asia. So you’re saying that Asian people don’t laugh, they only want giant robots? It’s all driven by money, ultimately.

Lena:
Because of what HBO’s value system is, I feel like I’ve been able to avoid the part of the job where those awful truths are revealed to me.

Judd:
Has it ever hit you that, in terms of the nightmare of television and development, you haven’t had to suffer?

Lena:
I think about that all the time. Every time I meet someone who is going through the network TV process. They seem so beaten down. And
your stories about your own career when you were younger—I have all these moments where I’m like, I am never allowed to complain about anything ever in my life because of how easy I’ve had it.

Judd:
But it’s also, I think, one of the main benefits of your show. You are not reacting from the place of someone who has been beaten up and, as a result, is flinching and making choices based on having been beaten up on other projects. Your lack of history is what makes the show feel pure.

Lena:
I feel so lucky because I’ve never had to take a note that I didn’t agree with. I’ve never felt like my vision has been diluted. And that’s a crazy thing to be able to claim. Judd, I have a question I have always wanted to ask you, but because this recorder is turned on, I feel emboldened to do so. Do you think people are scared of you?

Judd:
Scared of me?

Lena:
Yeah.

Judd:
I, uh, I don’t know. David Milch said something to me once, which I’d never considered before: He said executives don’t want to give notes and don’t want to stand behind their opinions. Executives want
you
to have enough power or reputation so that if you screw up, it’s your screwup, not theirs. The whole thing is inverted. Executives are looking for ways to
not
be responsible. And when you achieve a certain level of success, you’ll notice that some executives disappear because they have deniability about the process. “Of course I trusted Judd, he’s had enough success that I should let him do what he wants to do.” It’s actually harder for them to work with young people, because then they have to be responsible.

Lena:
That’s so interesting.

Judd:
As soon as I made people money, some people went away, but I never felt anyone being afraid of me. It was more like, “Oh, everything he does seems pretty solid. I’m going to let him do his thing.” Everybody told me you get five bombs before you go out of business. You can withstand five. Your budget will get lower every time you have a bomb. If you have three bombs in a row, then your budget’s going to drop to like eight million dollars. At five, you’re done.

Lena:
Five bombs in a row?

Judd:
Five bombs in a row, and you’re done.

Lena:
Have you had five bombs in a row?

Judd:
I’ve had things that are a wash. Nothing I’ve done has been a
bomb.
At the end of the day some of the more difficult movies, like
Funny People
, probably will lose a little money, but not a lot. Sometimes you make things and, the whole time, you’re aware that it might not make money, and yet it’s what you should be making at this moment in time and you hope it will connect in a big way because it is unique and personal. You have to try to do things that are more challenging to the audience. Those often become the biggest hits. Sometimes they don’t make a ton of money. I mean, you have to take your swings. As you have, with
Girls.
Do you think much about what you want to do, beyond the show?

Lena:
I want to make more movies because it’s something I love doing. I love the format. But TV is the best. When we first started, James L. Brooks said to me, “If a TV show is working, it’s the best job you’ll ever have.” And he was totally right. But there are stories I want to tell that aren’t serialized stories. Let’s see. I also want to write a novel. That’s something I have always wanted to do and then, at a certain point, kind of thought to myself,
Well, that’s going to go by the wayside….
It’s funny when you want to dabble in new things, and you must feel this sometimes, you get this realization:
Oh, there are people who have spent their whole lives figuring out how to do this, and the thing I make will never be equivalent to what they’re doing.
Are there any genres that you want to explore, that don’t seem like a natural fit for you?