Judd Apatow likes to say that comedy is always an experiment. During the COVID-19 lockdown, he turned into something of a mad scientist, using the time to produce “The Bubble,” a pandemic-themed feature film; a book of interviews, “Sicker in the Head” (a sequel to an earlier volume); and a documentary about George Carlin, one of his comedy heroes. As a teen-ager, Apatow was a suburban comedy geek when comedy was still uncool. In his early twenties, he was trying to be a standup, supporting himself by writing jokes for other comics, such as Roseanne Barr, when his roommate Adam Sandler was hired as a cast member on “Saturday Night Live.” Apatow put the performing urge on hold and dedicated himself to discovering and showcasing other funny people, as a writer, director, and producer. At twenty-four, he was running the too-brief “Ben Stiller Show,” at Fox, holed up in his office reading books about how to be a manager. Apatow is essentially an optimist, and the movies and TV shows that he’s made—from “Freaks and Geeks” and “Knocked Up” to “Love” and “The King of Staten Island”—have revealed him to be not only an exceptional developer of comic talent but a believer in the American enterprise of self-improvement. When the pandemic hit, he, like people all over the world, found himself wondering if he’d made the right choices. “We all keep ourselves so distracted that we rarely take the time to assess,” he told me, in a recent telephone conversation. And he needed to get out of the house. So he took his wife, Leslie Mann, and his younger daughter, Iris, rounded up a cast of funny actors from around the world, and made a movie about whether making a movie is a good use of anyone’s time. Cue the flying dinosaurs.
This interview was adapted from a recent conversation and from an earlier one, in 2016, that was excerpted on The New Yorker Radio Hour.
Your new movie, “The Bubble,” is a pandemic project about the pandemic. How did you come up with the idea?
I had always heard that Lorne Michaels takes a walk every day, and I never understood why. Right before the pandemic started, I took a walk with Jim Carrey on these trails above Santa Monica, and it was the first time I took a hike and realized why people do it. I had resisted it my entire life. During lockdown, I had this moment when I thought, O.K., I’m either going to gain forty pounds and go insane, or I’m going to go the other way. So I started walking, usually with my friend Brent Forrester, a great writer from “The Simpsons” and “The Office” and “Space Force.” After a few months of us yammering away about nothing, I said, “Maybe we should create projects and start outlining them while we walk.” I had heard about the N.B.A. bubble, and I thought, That’s a funny play: a Broadway show about twelve guys in the pandemic basketball bubble. Then I kept hearing about the “Mission: Impossible” bubble, and about the “Jurassic World” bubble.
I guess “Gilligan’s Island” was the original bubble.
That’s exactly right. And, boy, did I watch a lot of “Gilligan’s Island” as a kid.
Me, too. The film within the film is the sixth installment of a blockbuster franchise called “Cliff Beasts.” It has a tagline: “The brave people who fought heroically to bring distractions to humanity.”
I think we were all trying to figure out how to keep it together mentally. For me, it’s always by writing, but I didn’t think I could write about anything except what was happening to me. Nothing else felt important. And I am always fascinated by asking myself whether or not anything that I make is worth the time. Do we need movies? Is there any value to entertainment? Of course, I did realize that part of what got me through the pandemic was watching all of “Schitt’s Creek” and “Ted Lasso.” But, in my movie, I’m making fun of the corporate need to keep cranking out content no matter what’s happening. Even as the world is falling apart, businesses need to keep the factories open, keep the production going. But it’s also about everyone’s ego. People fall apart when they’re not getting the ego stroke they usually get when the world is stable.
When Will Ferrell was doing his George W. Bush impression on “S.N.L.,” I asked him, at The New Yorker Festival, “How does it feel to be impersonating a President who is himself impersonating a President?” You have a similar meta thing going on here. You’ve made a movie in a bubble about making a movie in a bubble.
I was trying to figure out if it was possible to shoot anything safely, and I felt like this idea could be pretty self-contained, because it’s ten people in a hotel and then a bunch of people on a soundstage shooting a flying-dinosaur movie against a green screen. I took Christopher Guest’s work as inspiration, as far as making a movie quickly—get an incredible cast and improvise with them and discover something through the process. Then, slowly, the movie got bigger and bigger, and I had special effects, and the dinosaurs were being created by Industrial Light & Magic, and we veered more toward “Tropic Thunder” than “Waiting for Guffman.”
How close was your moviemaking experience to the one shown in the film?
I thought we were going to shoot in a bubble. But they told us that that actually might be less safe, because if somebody gets sick in the bubble then everyone’s going to get sick. We did have very strict protocols. We were not allowed to hang out after work, which was difficult, because a lot of the [improv] process is talking about the movie—at dinner, over drinks. All the intimacy of the process was removed. It was like making a movie with someone eliminating every fun part. We didn’t even break the rules and sneak around, like the characters in the movie do.
The main person who advised us from Netflix is now the Surgeon General of the United States, Vivek Murthy! We just listened to everything he said, and we didn’t have one case of COVID. And we shot in England during the worst part of the pandemic—January through April of 2021. But it all felt crazy, because we were making a movie that was making fun of people who think it’s important to make a movie. We were satirizing the nervous breakdowns people have while being isolated, and having our own versions of those meltdowns. Everything was eleven layers of crazy. And we were trying to make comedy while people were in masks, and I was in a mask, and it was very difficult to communicate. We had a real COVID supervisor on set making sure everyone was wearing masks. And then we shot a scene where we had a fake COVID supervisor making fun of everything that the real guy just said to us five minutes earlier.
There’s that phrase in comedy—“Too soon!”—and I keep thinking, Well, this is now. Forget too soon. But I thought someone was going to do it, and it seemed like a fun challenge to try to find the right way to get everyone to commiserate about how this has affected our lives.
You were a writer on “The Larry Sanders Show,” with Garry Shandling—one of the most brilliant depictions of behind-the-scenes show business ever. Did co-writing this film, with Pam Brady, reactivate some muscle memory?
I’m endlessly fascinated by people who entertain and what their personalities are like. I first started writing about that when we did “The Ben Stiller Show,” and then on movies like “Walk Hard” and “Popstar.” It’s all part of my fascination with what Garry always talked about—the egos of creative people, the ways in which these people get limited, because they are in constant pursuit of approval. Garry always said that people are usually wearing some sort of mask and trying to present a version of themselves to the world that’s not true at all. So someone wants to look like a movie star or a director who knows what he’s doing, and they’re all just a moment away from cracking, because it is a façade—and that cracking, for some reason, is always funny.
In the movie, the scenario challenges all of the characters to assess what’s important, and we’re doing it in a pretty broad way. This is the silliest movie I’ve ever made. I showed it to Ben Stiller, and he said it was bonkers. I thought that was great because that’s not usually my tone. I’m usually trying to figure out: Can I be funny while making it very, very real? This is the first movie where I threw a lot of those rules out of the window.
At one point in the film, a producer tells a production assistant, “Actors are animals. And you are animal handlers.”
Well, I can’t say I’m an exception. My entire family works in this business. But we hope that we can call ourselves out on it and try to do a little bit better. The odd part is, first, that I felt the need to make a movie, when there is an argument that it would have been better for my mental health to spend more time quietly trying to evolve spiritually. But instead, I thought, What if I immediately go into production on a movie that talks about everything we’re all feeling but in a really silly way? And that’s another thing that the movie’s about. Is there something demented about thinking up a movie and then delivering it in a year?
George Saunders wrote a letter to his writing students after the pandemic shut down in-person classes, telling them that it was their duty—and their consolation—to bear witness to and write about what we were all living through. Do you think that COVID is going to produce any lasting cultural artifacts? There wasn’t a lot of great art produced about the Spanish flu of 1918.
There are plenty of things that have been good, but maybe not about COVID. I’ve been tracking who’s been productive during this time. Taylor Swift put out these amazing records. To me, that was an inspiration. She was able to be clearheaded enough to use that time to dig within herself to make something really remarkable.
Part of me also just wanted to get out of the house. So the idea of all of us going to England and making something together felt like a way to do something that fought against what this time wanted to do to us.
Your wife, Leslie Mann, and your daughter Iris are in “The Bubble.” It was a working family vacation.
It was either that or getting back online and trying to find a TV show we hadn’t watched. But we love working together, and it was a way of creating a community. I could finally get to work with Fred Armisen and Keegan-Michael Key and Karen Gillan. I realized that we were not going to be allowed to be around people unless we created jobs for them.
Before shooting started, we did some rehearsals on Zoom and that fed into the movie, and everybody was really creating their characters with me. I didn’t hand them a script that was ready to rock. I thought of the idea in the late summer, and in, maybe, October Netflix said they would be willing to make it. And we were shooting in February, and I hadn’t started writing yet.
If you look at the making of “The White Lotus,” which I think was a similar situation, Mike White thought of a way to go into production safely during the pandemic, in a bubble, and he got an enormous amount of freedom due to the circumstances. It’s brilliant work, and I think part of why it’s so great is because it’s a very pure thought. There were no years of development. It never got watered down. There was no committee.
There was no one to screw it up.
Sometimes with comedy, when you don’t have an enormous amount of time to overthink it and you’re working from instincts, it can be very helpful. It’s almost like seeing an improv group when they hit a vein and something hysterical happens. We tried to do that with the whole movie. The challenge was: Can I write a solid enough script with a thoughtful arc and also a lot of room to play for all of these heavy hitters, who have so much to offer?
It’s the “S.N.L.” principle. It’s got to be ready by eleven-thirty, and that gives it its own kind of energy and terror.
Yes. Sometimes, Fred Armisen would be so funny that I wouldn’t yell “Cut,” just to see where he would go. He was always right there, and I thought, He’ll never run out of gas. He would riff all day at the same level of energy. That’s my favorite part of this, because ultimately I’m just a comedy fan, and the fact that I’m even allowed to watch this stuff is half of why I make these things.
Because of all the improvising, you always end up with many more thousands of feet of film than most directors.
Digital memory, you mean.
I’m dating myself! I always wonder whether, in the future, people might try to edit together different versions of, say, “Knocked Up,” with all that leftover footage.
James Franco once asked me if I would give him all of the dailies of “Freaks and Geeks.” He just wanted to play with them and turn it into something else—which is a really fascinating idea. I mean, that’s what should happen at film school. If you’re studying to be an editor, someone should give you two million feet of film of “Knocked Up” and say, “O.K. Don’t look at the original movie. Turn this into a movie.” That would be great.
I’m envisioning the Judd Apatow chair at U.S.C. And a great tax deduction for you. In “The Bubble,” there’s a documentary crew, so you have a film within a film within a film. It’s a truism that the worse a project is, the better a documentary it makes. Like Les Blank’s “Burden of Dreams,” about the making of Werner Herzog’s “Fitzcarraldo.”
That was Jay Roach’s idea on one of our walks. We were thinking of “Lost in La Mancha,” the 2002 documentary about the making of Terry Gilliam’s “The Man Who Killed Don Quixote,” where everything went wrong. And we were talking about how when you make a movie now, there’s always a camera crew shooting the making of the movie and, in the social-media age, all that footage is used for promotion and it’s monetized. For instance, the Rock hanging out with the crew is Instagrammed to his gazillions of followers to promote his movie.
In “The Bubble,” Iris, your daughter, plays a TikTok star, who, clearly, is cast because the producers know that she is clickbait.
That’s part of the culture now—so we thought, We’ll have this girl who has so many followers that they’ve jammed her into the sixth installment of “Cliff Beasts” to keep it fresh and to attract a new audience. And everybody else is scared of her, because they know that this is the direction the movie business is moving in, and they are threatened by it. Iris basically wrote the part with me—she explained it to me. I would have written the character as a shallow person. She said, “No, these people are really talented, and sometimes they’re emotional and dramatic, and that’s why people are fascinated by them. They develop a connection with the audience. And they’re also under an enormous amount of pressure to keep it going. They have to crank out so much content.”
I don’t watch enough movies like “Cliff Beasts” to know whether directors are really casting these TikTok stars.
One example in the comedy world is Harry [Trevaldwyn]. When I got to England, I asked Peter [Serafinowicz] who there was hilarious and needed a break. He told me about Harry, who basically just had an Instagram. It’s him talking to his phone, doing characters and saying funny things as himself. So I talked to him on the phone, and I said, “Why don’t we make you the COVID-supervisor character? Let’s just have you on set every day and we’ll work you into things.” One day, we were shooting a scene, and I said to him, “Can you just describe all of your long-COVID symptoms?”—which is just a setup for him to improvise weird maladies. And he went for five solid minutes, like, “My rings change size every day. I have no sense of who my friends are anymore.” And we sat there astounded, because most people would be scared shitless in front of the entire cast, with no experience. And he stole a lot of the movie.
This was the first movie where I worked with a lot of comedy people from around the world—Vir Das from India, Maria Bakalova [from Bulgaria], and all the English actors, like Samson Kayo, and Ross Lee. So part of the challenge was: Can you do a hybrid of an American comedy style and an international comedy style? The initial thought was a group of ugly Americans surrounded by people from England and around the world, who have to deal with them. It was gratifying because there’s so many hysterical people from around the world that you don’t see enough of in American movies and television.
You also have a two-part documentary about George Carlin coming out on HBO, a collaboration with Michael Bonfiglio. A few years ago, you made one about Garry Shandling. Both films seem like the bigger-budget, grownup versions of the project you undertook as a fifteen-year-old in Long Island. Back then, you would call your comedy heroes and ask to interview them, saying that you were with the radio station WKWZ. Then you took the train in from Syosset with your bulky tape recorder, and for some reason no one threw you out.
I often joke that I was trying to invent the podcast in the early eighties. When I was a kid, I loved comedy so much, and there weren’t a lot of long-form interviews with comics anywhere. I wanted to read an hour-long interview with, say, Jerry Seinfeld, where somebody asked him about his childhood and how he got interested in comedy and how he does it. There was only the occasional Playboy magazine Q. & A. So, when I was in high school, I spent a few years interviewing about fifty people.
These were collected in your 2015 book, “Sick in the Head.”
Right. Some were writers and directors, like Harold Ramis and Al Franken, Tom Davis, Don Novello, Anne Beatts. I hunted down most of the original writing staff of “Saturday Night Live,” including James Downey and Alan Zweibel, who was really helpful in getting me in touch with everybody else. I was in his apartment, and, when he went in the other room to get his phone books, I took pictures of all of the photos on his wall and all the awards.
You were a self-taught comedy obsessive. And once you wrote a thirty-page term paper on the Marx Brothers just for your personal use.
Yes. Who would do that? Homework for your own amusement. I was in sixth grade. But my parents liked comedy. We had comedy albums around the house, and my grandmother was friends with the comedian Totie Fields. Just being around her made me realize that comedy was a place where weirdos and outcasts were empowered. One summer after my parents separated, my mom was a hostess at the East End Comedy Club, in Southampton, and I got to watch all of the comedy shows. Sometimes I think, Maybe my mom did that just for me. What could she have gotten paid to seat people at a comedy club?
We talked once about the connection between the upheaval of your parents’ divorce and the fact that you grew up to become a director/writer/producer rather than a performer.
We were an upper-middle-class family, and then, after the divorce, there were financial problems. I was a middle child, as well as a child of divorce, and that makes you become someone who tries to create safety. I always found safety in working. I like making things, but the joy isn’t in showing the finished project. It’s the middle part. As a producer, you take the most damaged part of your psyche and you use it for good. If you have catastrophic thinking—like I do—and you’re always moving, you think, What could go wrong? As a producer, that’s the best attribute to have, because you’re thinking, How many days do we need to shoot this? What would be the appropriate budget? You feel in control because you are solving problems all day long. It’s an unhealthy way to live your life. But it’s helpful for work.
When I was thirteen, my father went crazy and my family imploded. I’ve never made your “catastrophic thinking” connection before. But, when I started out, I always wanted to be an editor rather than a writer—focussing on the big picture, the way you describe doing.
It’s also a way to be supportive of other people, like, Oh, I can help make people’s lives less chaotic. So, if I’m working with Amy Schumer, say, I enjoy giving her an experience as a writer and an actor that’s pleasant, but on some level I’m doing it for myself, because I feel like I’ve had hard times, too, and I like helping people not have hard times.
Paying it forward.
When I was interviewing the comedians, as a kid, I was interested in the process. It helped me realize that they’re just human beings, they worked hard, and I wanted to know how to work hard. What were the steps? And so these [comedy] documentaries, they are, hopefully, a deep exploration of the psyche of these people. I’m very interested in exploring what happened in people’s childhood that led to them being creative. And how did they handle their success? Where did it go well? Where did they crash?
I’ve written about this in movies like “Funny People,” and I’m enjoying the form of documentary as a way to go even deeper. With Carlin, I was worried about making a documentary about someone that I didn’t know. Although I did interview him when I was nineteen years old—but I couldn’t find the tape! It’s the one tape I couldn’t find for “Sick in the Head.” A lot of our documentary is his daughter, Kelly Carlin, telling the story, and we were lucky to find twenty-three hours of conversations Carlin recorded with Tony Hendra for his autobiography. Two weeks before we finished the film, Kelly called and said, “I just found a giant grocery bag of thirty years’ worth of letters between my mom and my dad.” So we quickly reëdited the movie and added them, because these letters covered from the night they met to quickly getting married to being so broke that they’re writing to her parents to ask for money. And then through their challenges with sobriety, and then back to love letters. You see the arc of how they battle through all the challenges of their lives.
The Shandling documentary was a lot about his spiritual struggles, and his quest to live and work according to Zen principles. The Carlin film is more outward-facing. I hadn’t realized how thoroughly he had weathered the changing times and changed with them—that he started as a coat-and-tie comic and then morphed into the hippie-dippy guy, and then faltered, but regained his footing, ending up as a kind of nihilist elder statesman.
I remember meeting Larry Gelbart near the end of his life, and he was still doing some of his greatest work. He was so funny and engaged and current and edgy. That’s the type of person I pay a lot of attention to. How do you do that? How does Scorsese stay that in tune and sharp after so long? How do you not fade out? Quentin Tarantino always talks about how people only have ten good movies in them—but he’s a young guy! I remember when Sidney Lumet made “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead,” when he was in his eighties. Anyone who finds a path that allows them to grow and stay current has pulled off a very rare feat. I didn’t know that George Carlin had seen the young Sam Kinison and thought, I don’t want to be lame and compared to him. And then, for the rest of his life, in a way, he tried to out-Kinison Kinison. He decided to be a hundred-per-cent honest and brutal about all the things he was seeing in the world. If you go on Twitter, literally, every week, George Carlin is trending, because something happened in the news, and he has the best bit about it. Whether it’s abortion or corporate control of the government, Big Pharma, racism, freedom of speech—he has the best take on it.
He was especially tough on liberal orthodoxies—Save the Whales kind of stuff. If you think about comedians from an earlier era, stuck in the same checkered sports coat to the end, they would not have been looking at the new guard for inspiration. Maybe this is why we need to pay attention to the TikTok stars.
Carlin’s attitude changed over time. He was an idealist at the beginning, and at the end he certainly seems very cynical and let down by humanity. He thought they had a chance to do something great, that we all had a chance, and we’re blowing it. I always thought that his material was so dark as a way to wake people up. He took it as far as you could go. But some people think that, late in his life, when he says, “I like it when bad things happen. I’m just an observer now,” that he isn’t holding out any hope that people will change.
He would sign off by saying, “Take care of yourself, and take care of somebody else, too.” That’s a pretty good thing to aim for.
And he would say, “Don’t worry about saving the planet. The planet will be fine. We’re the ones who are going to disappear.”
This relates to your new book of interviews, the sequel, “Sicker in the Head.”
The new book is me asking people, “How can we be funny right now with all that’s happening? What are the ways that comedians can look at a very scary world, with so much conflict, so much polarization, and try to turn it into humor? The idea was to talk to people, like Samantha Bee and Hasan Minhaj and Ramy Youssef, to ask, “What are the challenges right now?” Because, as I said earlier, I always wonder how necessary any of it is.
One of the thoughts I always come back to is whether humor is helping, or if it’s preventing us from having very thoughtful, deep debates about how to solve the issues that threaten the world. For instance, we spent so much time turning the relationship between Trump and Putin into a joke. Did all the jokes make us not pay attention to the fact that, if this went the wrong way, it would lead to a mass slaughter? Did we not learn about it because funny pictures of Putin and Trump fuelled an industry of political comedy?
Well, people have always made fun of their leaders—King George, Teddy Roosevelt, Nixon. I hope you don’t think that you should ditch comedy and turn into a political commentator instead.
That’s a voice I hear in my head when things get really bad: When we laugh at a funny picture of Putin on a horse, is it like laughing at Hitler’s paintings? Are we not learning enough about what’s truly happening?
Did you do the interviews for “Sicker in the Head” over Zoom?
Most of them. The first book was mainly people I related to as a kid, comedians who looked like me. With the new book, I wanted to have the entire kaleidoscope of comedy. Most of the interviews were done post-George Floyd, when we were all thinking about a lot of important issues. When I would call people, I would usually be able to get them to do it because they were in lockdown with nothing to do. I got a lot of people who I had wanted to talk to for a long time, like David Letterman and Lin-Manuel Miranda and Whoopi Goldberg. People were very vulnerable and open. The interviews are much deeper than the last book because of the circumstances.
It allowed me to reach out. If I was feeling lonely and afraid at home with my family, playing the board games we had been avoiding our entire lives, I could get on the phone and talk to David Letterman for an hour and a half. When it comes to my contribution, the only thing I know how to do is to try to make something that hopefully will give people a break for a couple of hours and make them think about something. It’s either that or watching another season of “90 Day Fiancé.”
“Sicker in the Head” asks how comedy should function in a world that’s in free fall. That reminds me of something you said to me a few years ago, which is that with any comic premise, you need to start with a mess. It could be a messed-up character, like Adam Sandler in “Funny People.” But I guess it could also be the world—the whole mishpokah.
Right. I think, for comedy, people do need to be in distress. People who have their act together are just not that interesting. There’s no story if life is just working. So, every story is about someone who’s a mess or someone who’s immature. As I get older, I don’t know anybody who’s mature really. Everyone is in a panic, everybody is nervous, everybody is trying to do the right thing.
Does being successful make it harder to stay funny? Is there more humor to be found in life when you’re a lonely geek than there is when you live in a world of personal trainers and valet parking?
Yes. But it’s more about age, because the big turning points that you write about—high school, college, falling in love—a lot of that occurs in the first half of your life. So that’s the thing that’s different: life isn’t always as chaotic at this age. Things have settled, and that’s not as interesting to write about. That’s why, when you’re writing, you’re always going, like, How do I screw up this person’s life so that I have something funny to write about?
In everything I write, I have the same basic theme, which is we’re all struggling—we’re all trying to figure out how to be better.
