Judd: I went to USC cinema school for a year and a half and then I basically ran out of money and interest. How I knew that was, during college I went on The Dating Game and I won a trip to Acapulco, but it was happening during finals week—so I dropped out of college.
Charlie: Oh my God. How was Acapulco?
Judd: I got sunburned the first day and couldn’t leave the room for the next two days. And so I was living with my grandma Molly and my mom and working the clubs at night and emceeing at the Improv. So I was happy to move out to L.A.
Charlie: You were doing stand-up and emceeing at the Improv?
Judd: For money, I worked for Comic Relief producing benefits during the day so I had enough to pay my four-hundred-and-twenty-five-dollars-a-month rent.
Adam: He was making five hundred bucks a week. He was the only one of us who was guaranteed to pull in five hundred a week. We’d always say, “How’s he getting this Comic Relief job?” He would go in for a few hours and come back—he’s getting five hundred for only a couple of hours a day. There was a lot of anger towards him.
Charlie: What was he like as a roommate? I mean you were, he was Felix and you were—
Adam: I guess I was Oscar, you know, yeah. Judd’s a very, uh—
Charlie: Fastidious.
Adam: He is.
Charlie: And after being roommates, you remained friends? You stayed in touch?
Judd: When Adam got Saturday Night Live, he left and, you know, there was a question of whether or not he was going to keep the apartment in L.A. I quickly realized that wasn’t going to happen. And so I got another apartment.
Adam: That I had a room in.
Judd: That, yes, you had a room in.
Adam: He moved to another apartment, and just for my L.A. visits, which weren’t that frequent, he had an extra room for me.
Judd: It was very exciting because Adam got the job on Saturday Night Live out of the blue, which shocked me because Adam’s stand-up was kind of mumbling and bizarre and he didn’t do characters. He didn’t come from Second City, and then suddenly he’s like, “I’m the new cast member on Saturday Night Live.” How did that happen?
Adam: You know what is insane? How cocky I was back then. When I got offered Saturday Night Live, they offered me to be a writer and then eventually a performer and I was going, “I don’t know if I want to do that. These guys don’t understand.” And all my friends were like, “Just do it, you idiot.”
Charlie: Dummy.
Adam: Exactly.
Charlie: So why didn’t you make a movie together until now?
Adam: We did. We’ve worked on a bunch of movies together.
Judd: I started doing The Ben Stiller Show, which was a show that Ben and I created and was on for a season on Fox. That was the first big TV gig I got after writing jokes for people for a long time. I was doing that while Adam was on Saturday Night Live and then we both started writing movies. Adam wrote Billy Madison and I co-wrote a movie called Heavyweights with Steve Brill, and our friend Jack Giarraputo that Adam went to college with was the associate producer.
Adam: He [Jack] was your assistant.
Judd: He was my assistant. And then he moved over to Billy Madison, and then we worked together a little bit when I did some rewrites on Happy Gilmore. So every few years, I would come in and help out. I always wanted to do this but I did feel like I needed to have learned enough to be able to take on something so ambitious.
Charlie: And what did you want to do?
Judd: To make a movie with Adam and to make it personal because, you know, we know each other so well. I always wanted to tap into that but I also didn’t know how to direct so I needed ten or fifteen years to get that together.
Adam: I always knew Judd was—you know, we have similar tastes. He’s doing movies differently than I did them but we always made each other laugh. We always felt comfortable with each other. We liked the same things. Judd liked a lot of stuff I never even heard about, a lot of music, a lot of movies. He brought me in to a different world. Then Judd gave me—he said, “Check out my movie, Knocked Up.” I was shooting a movie at the time. I watched it in my trailer with a couple of my buddies and I was just like, Apatow is unbelievable. I called him up and said, “Judd, whatever is next, let’s do it.” And he said, “All right, I think I’m going to have something.”
Charlie: See, that says something interesting about him, doesn’t it? Looking out for himself by calling you up and saying, “You know I admire what you do, and think about me the next time you make something that might be right.” And on the other hand, he’s a huge star when he makes that call.
Judd: I was thrilled and then I instantly had to go in my notebook and be like, What would be the idea for Adam? Oh, maybe this one? I’d always wanted to make a movie about comedians. It’s not a subject that’s been handled great on film and if you do it badly, all comedians will hate you for the rest of your life. So you feel that pressure but in the back of my head I thought, I think I’m one of the few people that know this world enough to get it across on-screen. It just took a long time to work up the courage.
Charlie: Before we talk about Funny People, both of you know comedians, you understand comedians. You are comedians. What are the common denominators among the people you know who do what you do, whatever variation of it: write jokes, stand-up, comic films, whatever?
Judd: In personality, it’s different. There are some guys who are kind of smart and witty and funny, and there are some guys who are just a little bit off, and there’s some guys who clearly got a beat-down at some point during their young life and that made them feel the need to get attention.
Charlie: And so which one is he?
Adam: So many of those.
Charlie: All of the above.
Judd: There is a moment on Garry Shandling’s DVD commentary for The Larry Sanders Show where he talks about this with Jerry Seinfeld and Jerry Seinfeld says to Garry, “Why can’t you be a comedian just because you’re talented and you’re smart and that’s why you’re a comedian?”
Charlie: That’s what I would ask, yes.
Judd: And Garry just goes, “Why so angry, Jerry?” I think that captures it.
Charlie: Okay, Funny People.
Judd: Yes.
Charlie: What’s the passion you had for this?
Judd: I wanted to talk about when I first became a comedian and the moment I was allowed into the world of comics, which was very exciting for me. The people I worked with when I first started were incredibly nice to me and I was just in heaven being around them. You know, I wrote for Roseanne and Tom Arnold. That was one of my first jobs. They bought me a Rolex for Christmas. They paid me eight hundred dollars a week and suddenly I could afford valet parking. It was all positive so I knew I needed to fabricate something and then I had another idea, which is, I wanted to write a movie about someone who is sick who gets better—
Charlie: Who is sick with a terminal illness and thinks it’s all over.
Judd: Yes, and it’s about how he realizes that he’s more comfortable being sick and the way that makes him feel, in terms of appreciating life, than he is when he gets better. Suddenly, there’s time again and he starts becoming neurotic and has kind of a meltdown. That was the initial thought.