SuperBad Cast Interview

MoviesOnline caught up at San Diego’s Comic-Con with the creative team behind "Superbad” and had a chance to sit down at the Sony press panel with Judd Apatow, Seth Rogen, Jonah Hill, Michael Cera, Evan Goldberg, Greg Mottola, Shauna Robertson, and Seth Rogen to talk about their new film.

From producers Judd Apatow and Shauna Robertson (The 40-Year-Old Virgin), screenwriters Evan Goldberg & Seth Rogen ("Da Ali G Show"), and director Greg Mottola comes "Superbad,” a coming-of-age cautionary tale about two socially inept teenage boys about to graduate high school. Theirs is a ridiculously dependent friendship -- but now they've gotten into different colleges and are forced to contemplate life apart.

Evan (Michael Cera) is sweet, smart, and generally terrified. Seth (Jonah Hill) is foul-mouthed, volatile, and all-consumed with the topic of human sexuality. This is the story of their misguided attempts to reverse a lifelong losing streak with the ladies in one panic-driven night.

These guys are super funny and we really enjoyed our time with them. Here’s what they had to tell us about "Superbad”:

Question: How was the petty cab adventure last night?

Seth Rogen: Oh, it was great. Did you see us on the petty cab?

Question: I saw you without a shirt.

Seth Rogen: I did it for Jonah.

Jonah Hill: Yeah, you can blame that no shirt one on me all you want. You do that for yourself. Me, Evan and his girlfriend, Lisa, we're all in -- is that what they call it, a petty cab?

Question: Yes.

Jonah Hill: Where someone is just bicycling the cab and we're sitting in the carriage, the three of us. And Evan has no shirt on and we're just hopping around San Diego in this.

Evan Goldberg: And we kept trying to talk to the guy and he wouldn't respond and then afterwards he just turned around and went "Oh, oh." We had to tip him so much extra.

Seth Rogen: There was 800 pounds of Jew on that thing. [Laughter]

Question: Can you tell us about the script?

Seth Rogen: Well, it's about two guys who had a hard time getting laid in high school, so you pick that -- that was fairly close to life. Me and Evan never really had an emotional head, so-to-speak, that we ever came to. We never really hugged each other, I guess.

Evan Goldberg: We had emotions for one another. We held hands.

Seth Rogen: We held hands for humor, but some of the stuff, I would say it's inspired by true events. I guess, if we were about to get sued, that's what I would say our defense is. But it's more just kind of based on how we felt in high school. Some of the little details and things that happened are stuff that actually happened to us, but it's mostly just kind of autobiographical internally, I would say. That's a weird thing to say.

Question: Can you comment on the film’s homoerotic subtext?

Evan Goldberg: What?

Seth Rogen: Subtext?

Evan Goldberg: I thought it was text. [Laughter]

Question: How did you come up with Superbad?

Seth Rogen: The title?

Question: The movie.

Seth Rogen: The movie, oh, we were in high school and we just really --

Evan Goldberg A bad run of shitty movies we watched.

Seth Rogen: And we just decided let's try to write a funny movie that we would love to see, you know. We started and we wrote a very bad, dirty movie and then rewrote it for 15 years. [Laughs]

Question: What were some of the bigger changes that evolved as you guys evolved?

Evan Goldberg: One thing that always lacked was a complete lack of a really good emotional story, which this young man here [referring to Judd Apatow] helped us out with.

Seth Rogen: Yeah, it was always basically about two guys who were trying to get alcohol for the girls they liked. That was always there, but there was really no emotional story to it other than that. There was no real good story about their friendship with one another. Judd really helped develop that.

Judd Apatow: Having lived life actually…

Seth Rogen: Exactly. He told us like—

Question: Was that where one of the ideas of them going to different schools came into it?

Seth Rogen: Yeah, the idea of them going to different schools was a fairly recent addition. That was just kind of something like, this could work, this could kind of be the fuel for all of it almost. We really wrote it backwards. Now we would know that's not the way to write a movie.

Evan Goldberg: We didn't do an outline. We started with a terrible fantasy sequence.

Jonah Hill: We drew pictures.

Seth Rogen: Yeah, we drew it on bar napkins. [Laughs]

Evan Goldberg: There are actually a lot more dick jokes in the original.

Seth Rogen: If you can imagine, yeah.

Judd Apatow: That was in the very first draft I read, which actually was the hook that got me interested, was the penis drawing. I thought that was enough to build something around.

Evan Goldberg: I just remember before Judd got involved, I remember the last line was intelligently fuck you.

Seth Rogen: Yeah, that was like the last line of the whole movie. We're like, "You should add some emotion to this." [Laughs]

Question: If the movie makes like $200 million --

Evan Goldberg: It will.

Seth Rogen: It better.

Question: Do you have plans for a sequel or spinoff, or something like that?

Judd Apatow: Here is my theory. There is a 10% -- Jonah thinks we should, because he thinks we'll fuck it up. I say there's a 10% chance that it won't suck, and isn't that enough to try?

Seth Rogen: I want to make love in a musical.

Evan Goldberg: I want "SuperBad versus Predator."

Question: Jonah, how surprised are you that you've kind of secured this extraordinary -- I mean, acceptable, so I don't know how long ago that was, it doesn't seem that --

Jonah Hill: I'd say nine years ago now.

Question: How proud are you that you've kind of become -- you're a leading man and almost a romantic leading man.

Jonah Hill: I don't know, I'm just excited, man. I think like Judd and pretty much everyone on this panel besides Michael and Chris, have given me a ton of opportunities. They haven't done anything for me. But from here to where Chris starts, it's really like without them I probably wouldn't have had all these opportunities, and I'm just psyched that--I'm hopefully not letting them down for giving me these opportunities.

Judd Apatow: Are you just saying that because Nightline is here?

Seth Rogen: Exactly.

[Laughter]

Jonah Hill: Yeah, I’m going to do a piece of it for Nightline. I’m going to start crying soon. I’m just excited, man. I just hope I do a good job. I get to work with all my friends, which is like the most exciting part of all this.

Question: Can you relate to your character?

Jonah Hill: Yeah, totally. I didn't get laid in high school.

[Laughter]

Question: What about now?

Jonah Hill: I don't know, do you want to go have sex?

Seth Rogen: Jonah is getting laid right now.

[Laughter]

Jonah Hill: I'm laying you with my eyes.

Judd Apatow: A few minutes ago Jonah said, I think I'm going to get laid, let me borrow your Purell.

Jonah Hill: I’m was just going to use Purell for lubricant.

Seth Rogen: Exactly.

Jonah Hill: No, but thanks, I'm just—I’m psyched, man. That's all I can say. I'm excited.

Question: Did you pick anything up hanging around these guys since it was sort of semi-autobiographical?

Judd Apatow: Michael lived with me for a month.

Seth Rogen: You studied him like Jane Goodall.

Jonah Hill: Seth and I hang out a lot and I remember like a month or so before we started shooting it was kind of said in like a one-sentence thing of like, don't do an impression of me, basically. Do it your own style to make it your own. But it went like this. I'm sitting there and he goes, "You're not going to do me, right?" And that was all -- and then we never spoke like ever again. It was just kind of -- I wasn't trying to be like Seth or—the character was really well written and then I just tried to add as much of my own sense of humor and what my strengths probably would be, and then Greg helped a lot just telling me what he thought would be the best.

Greg Mattola: But we had a really hard time casting the part, because originally it was going to be Seth playing it, and so actually it got really old. We'd done a table read of it, I directed some episodes of "Undeclared" and we'd done a table read in like 2002 or something.

Seth Rogen: 2001.

Greg Mattola: 2001, and Seth read it and it was great. It was truly great. And then when we started bringing people in to read it, I was a bit of a sticker about age, because I wanted the characters to all be like 19, and that was the only reason we didn't go to you right away, was because you were 21.

Jonah Hill: Me?

Greg Mattola: You were 21, 22? No, but you were 22 when we --

Jonah Hill: Oh, back then? Oh, yeah.

Greg Mattola: So, anyway, everyone --

Shauna Robertson: 21 going on 45.

Greg Mattola: So we read a ton of people and no one was good at it. No one could make that character sympathetic.

Judd Apatow: No one was as good as Sarah. Sarah ruined it.

Seth Rogen: We cast Michael first.

Judd Apatow: Michael was so amazing.

Seth Rogen: And it was bad because that wasn't even the funny guy. We're like, "Shit, the non-funny guy is funnier than the funny guy. What are we supposed to do?"

Greg Mattola: I remember when we found him, instead of being like, "Yes," we're like, "Oh, this is going to be hard now."

Question: You had to find two actors who could really grow close to each other in certain ways.

Greg Mattola: You'd have to believe that they actually could be best friends, but the fact that these two completely different people liked each other would make you like them even more. And then Judd just called me one day and said we have to -- he's like he's hiding in plain site, why are we not reading Jonah? And we read -- you read on the set of "Knocked Up," right?

Jonah Hill: Yeah, well I read it at a table read. I read like one of the coke dudes, like one of those things, and the driver, Joe Lo Truglio's part. And then we were just hanging out on the set of "Knocked Up" and I said, we all were like with some of the same agency or whatever, and I was like, "I want to play that part in "SuperBad," and they said I was too old. And then we were hanging out outside of Seth's trailer, me, Seth and Bill, and then Judd walked up and was like, "How young could you think you look?" I was like, "I don't know, 18 or something." And then I shaved and then we went into Seth's trailer and made a tape. And then Shauna was like, and everyone was like –

Greg Mattola: They emailed it to me.

Evan Goldberg: They called me and I was like, "No way."

Seth Rogen: Like, what a waste of all our time.

Jonah Hill: Because I was only like a year or two younger then.

Judd Apatow: If we had to do a play, it wouldn't have worked.

Seth Rogen: It was all mocap.

[Laughter]

Greg Mattola: But it wasn't like - you didn't do it exactly the way Seth had done it when I had seen Seth do it, but you brought this like real deer-in-the-headlights fear to everything, all the bravado of what he was saying. So he could say the most disgusting things and there was nothing disgusting about it because it was human. You just made it so much more relatable than anyone else could since Seth.

Judd Apatow: And Sarah was still way better than him.

Greg Mattola: Exactly, trying to be.

Question: So now that Greg’s done such a good job with SuperBad, is he going to make more?

Greg Mattola: In 10 years I will do "SuperBad 2."

Question: Judd, what is it about you that seems to be -- I mean, everyone just loves the fact that you've become this iconic successful filmmaker, writer, producer, director. What do you think you tap into that has made you and your films so successful?

Judd Apatow: The main thing I'm doing is having Shauna do all the work, and that seems to just be working out.

Question: So, it's delegating.

Judd Apatow: Yeah, yeah. It's a bait-and-switch. Well, Shauna is a gigantic part of what's happening, and she produced all the movies with me, as well as "Elf." We did "Anchorman" together, and "Mystery Alaska," "Indian Summer." Let's just talk about all of them. Anyway, but that's important because I'm really not doing too much.

Seth Rogen: He's wearing a bathing suit. He's wearing a bathing suit. [Laughs]

Jonah Hill: Short pants!

Judd Apatow: I don't really understand what's happening right now. All I know is that as I begin to ponder it, it is disappearing out of my hands. I can feel whatever's going on.

Seth Rogen: It's leaving us.

Judd Apatow: Yeah. I feel like Peter Frampton after "Frampton Comes Alive." I'm locking up as we speak. You're seeing the peak of it. Last night's standing ovation of "SuperBad" basically was the beginning of the end. I mean, I don't know, it's the same stuff we've been trying to do from the beginning. We've always wanted to make movies like these. We weren't allowed to. We tried since I started, and suddenly they're letting us. And I think as they do well, they give us a little more rein each time. And because we haven't screwed it up, that rein allows us to take chances. The budgets are small enough that people aren't too anal with what we're doing, and I think there's something natural happening that will soon screw up and we'll all price ourselves out of the business. That's what I'm looking forward to.

Question: Are you going to be able to keep the budgets down and keep it like that, in this range, this price range?

Judd Apatow: Well, the next movie we're doing, we're doing a small drama with Seth that cost $211 million.

Seth Rogen: Exactly. I play someone who is 600 feet tall.

Judd Apatow: I would like to keep the budgets low and I'm trying to find a way now to do them for even less. That's the only thing I could even emotionally handle what's happening, is to go, "How can we do this for $11 million instead of $33 million?" So, I would like to stay in that world, if we can.

Question: Seth, what's going on with the comic book movie?

Seth Rogen: Well, "The Green Hornet" I assume is what you're talking about. I would only call it comic book movie since there was only a handful of real "Green Hornet" comic books ever made, but it's something that I've always been a fan of, and Evan is really into. We're writing it. We're trying to keep it as true to the 1966 TV series as possible. We want it to be an adventure action movie, somewhere in the world of "Lethal Weapon" and "Indiana Jones," I guess you would say. I mean, tonally that's kind of what we're striving for. We just want it to be fun and kick-ass.

Jonah Hill: Super-sexy.

Seth Rogen: And sexy.

Question: Are you trying to keep it straight?

Seth Rogen: Yeah, we're not doing like a goofy re-imagining of "The Green Hornet." You know, he's not get bitten by a radioactive hornet or anything like that. But we're making it urban. [Laughs]

Judd Apatow: But he does have foreskin.

Seth Rogen: Exactly, two inches of foreskin is the only difference.

Question: Will you be able to use the Green Hornet theme song?

Seth Rogen: Oh, I hope so. I mean, that's up to Sony's lawyers, I guess.

Question: What about Stephen Chow as Kato?

Seth Rogen: I mean, that is -- he is one of many awesome people out there. I mean, I don't know, we haven't actually talked to him or anything like that. It's hard to cast someone when you have no idea. We've never written anything that anyone thinks will allow you to write this movie. We don't know shit, do you want to be in our movie? [Laughs]

Question: Why were you guys the obvious choice to write this?

Seth Rogen: We're not, we're just the guys -- I mean, it's one of these things I'm sure a lot of people wanted to do it, they picked us. You'll have to ask them that.

Question: Can you talk about the similarities between "SuperBad" and "Green Hornet."

Seth Rogen: They're buddy movies. They're both about relationships between two guys.

Jonah Hill: Well, you just made an action movie.

Seth Rogen: Yeah, and you know, "Pineapple Express" we made – which, you know the people who have seen it really think the action is kick-ass, which is kind of -- is one of the reasons we thought we could even maybe make a movie like "The Green Hornet" because we saw that it actually works, and tonally you can kind of keep it real and have good action and good emotions and humor, and it all can kind of work together, I guess.

Question: Are you planning on keeping the car and the gas can?

Evan Goldberg: The car for sure.

Seth Rogen: And the gas I mean, honestly I have no idea.

Judd Apatow: We have to keep the car.

Seth Rogen: Legally we have to.

Question: What sort of cast do you think will be in the movie?

Seth Rogen: Michael Cera is Kato. [Laughter] We're using Kato Kaelin as the drastic reinvention of it.

Question: You were just talking about "Pineapple Express" it was screened recently, and it looks pretty good already. It's going to come out in August of --

Seth Rogen: '08.

Question: '08. Do you think you can hold off that long? I mean, is it just a scheduling thing for dates or marketing?

Seth Rogen: Yes, Judd has a movie coming out every week between now and then. It's literally our own only window. [Laughs] We’ll go up against Indiana Jones.

Question: Can you talk about being here for Comic Con?

Judd Apatow: Being at Comic-Con? [turns to Chris Mintz-Plasse] Chris, how is it for you being here at Comic-Con?

Chris Mintz-Plasse: It's cool. I mean I walked around and saw some cool things like Alien vs. Predator action figures and stuff.

Evan Goldberg: Predator versus SuperBad.

Question: Are you going to have an action figure of yourself, do you think?

Chris Mintz-Plasse: That would be cool.

Seth Rogen: That would be great. [Laughs]

Jonah Hill: I wish there would be a SuperBad video game. That would be like my favorite video game.

Judd Apatow: The most inappropriate video game.

Seth Rogen: Exactly.

Jonah Hill: Yeah, It’d be awesome.

Judd Apatow: You're too drunk.

Seth Rogen: The weed controller kind of looks like a dick.

Question: What are each of you doing next?

Jonah Hill: I'm writing right now. I'm just taking some time to write some movies and trying to get better at that. I don't know what I'm going to act in next. I just kind of want to take my time and not rush into acting in another movie unless I really think it's going to be awesome.

Judd Apatow: Michael Cera and I are about to do a movie in January.

Question: ` What is that?

Judd Apatow: "Year One." Hal Ramis is directing with Michael and Jack Black.

Question: Who do you play in "Year One”?

Michael Cera: I'm playing Jack Black's friend.

[Laughter]

Seth Rogen: Everyone’s friends with Jack Black.

Judd Apatow: Did Jack Black say he’s playing Michael Cera’s friend?

Seth Rogen: Or is he just saying, "Oh, I’m playing me. I’m just Jack Black.” [Laughs]

"Superbad” opens in theaters on August 17^th.