Judd Apatow talks Trump, The King Of Staten Island and why he is conflicted by comedy in 2020
The King Of Staten Island is about to be one of the first high-profile films released in Aussie cinemas. But director Judd Apatow admits there is sometimes no tolerance for comedy.
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Judd Apatow admits he’s feeling a little conflicted about the role of comedy in 2020.
The stand-up comedian, writer and director has been making audiences laugh for more than 25 years, first in TV programs such as The Larry Sanders Show and Freaks and Geeks and then on the big screen in The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Funny People, This Is 40 and Trainwreck.
But he is painfully aware that new movie, The King Of Staten Island, which will be one of the first high-profile releases to hit recently reopened Australian cinemas this week, is coming out in sobering times, with the coronavirus still rampaging in his homeland, protests on the streets and what could well be the most divisive presidential election in living memory looming at the end of the year.
Apatow, one of the fiercest Trump critics on Twitter, says he’s grateful for the work of satirists such as Samantha Bee and Trevor Noah right now, but sometimes despairs that the state of his nation and the world has gone beyond the realms of what comedy can address.
“There is also a part of me that thinks some of these problems are so serious that comedy may slow us down from the important work of trying to solve these issues,” he says. “There is much to figure out and I definitely have days where I have no tolerance for humour because I want people to take things much more seriously than they are in our country. So I guess it depends on my mood.”
And while he’s spent his time in isolation at his Los Angeles home digging into self-help books and reassessing his priorities (“Do I like hanging out with those people? Do I like doing that during the day?”), he hopes he will look back on 2020 as “the year that the madness began to end”.
“The year we voted Trump out of office, the year we took civil rights issues much more seriously, the year that people started talking about disparities and started to come up with real solutions,” he says. “That’s the outcome we need to work towards, but we are certainly not there yet.”
It’s perhaps no coincidence that The King Of Staten Island is Apatow’s most serious film, more a personal drama with laughs than an out-and-out comedy. It was co-written with stand-up comedian Pete Davidson, who based it on his own experiences of growing up in the often-overlooked New York borough having lost his firefighter father at the age of seven in the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
Davidson, who was once engaged to singer Ariana Grande and has been open about his mental health battles in his raw and honest stand-up routines, has said the character he plays is like a “what-if” version of himself, had he not found the creative outlet of writing and performing.
Apatow had been impressed by Davidson after an introduction through mutual friend Amy Schumer and the then-rising star ended up making a cameo in their 2015 comedy Trainwreck.
“He was 19 years old and way funnier than me or any of my friends were at 19,” says Apatow. “He has a very dark sense of humour, he was very sophisticated at a young age and he had clearly been through a lot and was an amazing storyteller and very honest. I instantly thought that he was going to do some big things.”
While the first film project they worked on together didn’t work out – “mainly because I gave him the wrong idea,” says Apatow — the pair found a rich vein of comedy and drama by tapping into Davidson’s painful childhood of growing up with a father who was lost in a national tragedy.
“The most fun part of making this movie is that he is fearless and is very willing to explore terrain that most people make a point of avoiding,” Apatow says. “Because it’s not just talking about his pain, it’s about talking about his mental torture. He’s trying to describe to people what it’s like to really suffer the emotional reverberations of having a loss at seven years old, and a loss that’s tied to a national tragedy.
“There are so many ways in which it complicated his life and his mind and I am hopeful that making the movie has been very cathartic for him and has allowed him to untie some of those knots.”
Apatow was also able to guide Davidson through the tricky proposition of essentially playing a fictionalised version of himself, having watched Garry Shandling do the same thing at The Larry Sanders Show and also having injected autobiographical elements into his own earlier films such as Funny People and This Is Forty, both of which also starred his wife, Leslie Mann, and their two daughters, Maude and Iris.
“I lost my mum a year before we made Funny People. She had cancer, which was a long road, and I think Funny People was a way of talking about the feeling I was having at that time and my observations of her struggle with her mortality. I never talked about it when the movie came out – I never said ‘this movie was inspired by my mum’s passing’ but it really was what I was working through.”
Like Davidson and many of his leading actors such as Schumer, Adam Sandler and Seth Rogen, Apatow got his start in stand-up comedy. As his success as a writer, director and producer took off, he drifted away from live performing but he says returning to the stage in 2014 improved both his professional and personal lives.
“I think I’d missed the camaraderie,” he says. “I made so many friends when I returned to comedy in 2014. As a person who makes movies and is married and has children it’s very easy to get up, go edit, write, go home, have dinner, pass out – and I think I probably neglected friendship.
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“I also think the immediacy of performing for people tuned me into what the world is thinking about and also what’s making people laugh now. It also made me think about my life and my feelings and my opinions and it just enriched my creativity generally. I think it’s made all my work better.”
The King Of Staten Island is released on Thursday.