Interview with Judd Apatow ("Freaks And Geeks," "Undeclared") - Sitcoms Online Message Boards

AKA · 08-13-2005, 01:03 PM

Thought this was appropriate for this forum, since his TV shows (The Ben Stiller Show, Freaks And Geeks and now Undeclared) have found a second life on DVD.

Judd Apatow

The Undeclared creator discusses his new DVD, The 40 Year-Old Virgin, and his future in films and television.

By Todd Gilchrist
IGN

August 12, 2005 - Judd Apatow might just be Hollywood's most successful failure. Like few other TV writers and producers working today, he has seen more projects canceled than continued (think The Ben Stiller Show, The Critic, Freaks and Geeks among others), and yet maintains a position as one of the industry's most acclaimed, respected and sought-after artists. Thankfully, DVD has offered him a second chance to find appreciative audience for his programs: Freaks and Geeks was released last year with a flurry of attention, vindicating the show as a great chronicle of teen angst; and now he's hoping that the same mania will claim viewers again with the release of Undeclared.

IGN recently caught with Apatow via phone to discuss the release of Undeclared on DVD. In addition to his comments about the celebrated, ratings-deficient show, he reveals a few secrets about the forthcoming 40 Year-Old Virgin DVD, and explains how the making of Anchorman gave birth to not one but two full-length feature films.

IGN DVD: How's everything today, Judd?
Judd Apatow: Good, good. We've got the [40 Year-Old Virgin] movie coming out next week. It's one of those ones that oddly fell into place and came out well, and isn't a nightmare.

IGN DVD: How much are you having to juggle that and the promotion for the Undeclared DVD set?
Apatow: Well, I timed Undeclared to come out the week before the movie came out so every time anyone asks me about Virgin, I can push the Undeclared DVD. I'm doing press junkets this weekend, and we're trying to get some people to pay attention.

IGN DVD: When you first started Undeclared, did you approach the show any differently given the fact that Freaks and Geeks, your other, similarly-themed series, was ultimately cancelled?
Apatow: Well, we thought if we did a show that was half and hour instead of an hour and was more of a comedy than a drama… actually, we used to say that Freaks and Geeks was a drama that had comedy in it, and we said that this was a comedy that had some drama in it! Flip the 60-40 percentages, with more comedy than drama, and we could do something fun because high school is inherently painful for a lot of people, but college is the reward for having survived. So we thought this was a way to do something that would be different because the setting is different but our approach to the work would be the same, to be honest and truthful and revealing.

IGN DVD: When you went back to revisit the material, was there anything you insisted be included to make sure that audiences understood the show better, or could appreciate it more?
Apatow: Well, there was this episode that never aired called "God Visits, which was about Steven getting approached by one of the Christian groups and getting really into it, and at the same time, Charlie Hunnam's character Lloyd gets flipped out by a philosophy professor who's teaching existentialism. It was a fun episode that never aired - of course they promised us it would air - because I thought, 'how could you not air an episode? You paid for it! How would it be better not to air it?' But apparently there was some financial motivation for not airing an episode they paid for. So it's great that's on the DVD, and there's also an episode that we shot two versions of.

What happened was we shot six episodes because at the time, Fox was in dire straits and didn't have any hit shows. So they ordered six episodes before even seeing a pilot, and by the time we finished the six, they had a bunch of hit shows. They didn't need us, so they didn't air the first episode until almost ten or eleven months after we shot it. But in that time, everyone was sitting around thinking a little too much about how the episodes were, and they asked for some adjustments in some of the episodes, and one of the episodes was about taking the girl he likes, Lizzie, to a Ted Nugent lecture. I guess maybe they found that a little too obscure a concept, so we shot another version of the date where they go see American Pie outside. We liked both of them equally, but it was one of those things where we said 'well, if the network will like us more and not cancel us as quickly if we listen to some of their thoughts, then let's do it.' Of course, that didn't work at all and they canceled us one episode quicker than Freaks and Geeks, after promising that they would never do that to us, and that NBC was a bunch of fools, and then they do the exact same thing.

So that I'm excited about, and then there's a Loudon Wainwright concert on the DVD that we videotaped in Los Angeles that I think is amazing and is worth the price of the DVD right there. It has a lot of funny, bitter, sweet songs that have inspired my work for a long time.

IGN DVD: So what ultimately do you think led to the demise of the show?
Apatow: Well, when I'm working I just try to do what I think is truthful and funny and I don't pay too much attention to the trends. We did experiment with different types of episodes - some were broader than others, some had more dramatic moments than others - but I think it's really hard to launch a show three weeks after 9/11. It made us feel foolish talking about our little show after that happened. We were supposed to air I think the 26th of September, and then 9/11 happened, and it definitely knocks out all of your press, because no one's talking about new TV shows, but you do end up airing mid-October, and I don't know if people are in the mood to laugh at some silly new show.

I think a lot of people went back to their old favorites; when you're terrified, you go back to your old friends - you're not in an experimental mode - and it also messed up all of the networks' schedules. It changed when the World Series was, it had a lot of effects on the schedule that year, and at the same time it was real hard to try to be funny after that. It was difficult writing and producing the show in the shadow of that. But then as I say in the liner notes on the DVD, I saw Garry Trudeau on Nightline, and he was talking about how hard it was to write Doonesbury after 9/11, and about how he wasn't sure if there was any purpose to what he does for a living.

He slowly realized that he does make an important contribution to society even if it's only making people happy for a very brief moment during the day and making them think a little bit, and that was inspiring to me and helped us get our groove back. But it affected our ability to launch the show, and they give you very little time to get traction, so it's hard to say why we didn't. I've always felt most good shows take a little while to find their audience, especially comedies.

IGN DVD: What did you learn from the experiences of making Freaks and Geeks and Undeclared that you took to future projects?
Apatow: It taught me to make movies (laughs). It [led] me to make Anchorman and The 40 Year-Old Virgin - that's what it led me to - or make shows for basic cable or HBO or Showtime. That's how I would do it next time, because I don't want to change what I do or how I see things. It's also a sad fact that these shows are getting shorter and shorter because they're adding more commercials and promos, and a 'half hour' show is about 21 minutes of story, and over the years for five or six minutes of story to disappear, it changes the whole idea of a half-hour comedy. It's hard to take your time with that limitation. It was much easier on Freaks and Geeks to just sit there and have three kids talking on a street corner for like three or four minutes. You can't do that in a half-hour show; it rushes you a little bit.

What's your favorite of the Undeclared episodes, or the one that you're proudest of?
Apatow: I'm proud of the fact that the pilot is so strong. It has a lot of personal ideas in it; I had a long distance relationship during college, and it's got some funny, honest jokes about that, and I think it's a pretty good pilot where there's a kid coming to school and his parents decide to get divorced the second he leaves, as if they've been waiting for that moment his whole childhood, and then a girl who has a long-distance boyfriend has sex with him in spite of her boyfriend back home (laughs). It's an idea I'm proud of, and I think it launched a funny relationship of trying to get that girl to ever do it with you again.

I like the episode with Will Ferrell where he plays a speed freak who will write your term paper for fifty bucks. Will did that when he was finishing up his last season on Saturday Night Live, and it was fun to do an episode with him and have fun with him as an actor, because at that point it was before Old School or Elf or any of those things. We were just very lucky to have fun and play with him before he got big.

I also think that the "Truth or Dare" episode that Seth Rogen wrote. It's just a great, funny episode where they try to plan everything they're going to say in advance in a Truth or Dare game with the girls they like. It just works really well, and any time something really comes together and all of the pieces fit it's pretty exciting.

IGN DVD: How much has DVD become sort of a second chance for your shows to find an audience after their network runs have ended?
Apatow: I've always loved the DVD format and I look forward to getting anything I do out on DVD. Right now we're working on the 40 Year-Old Virgin DVD, and I'll work for months with an editor just for the DVD of The 40 Year-Old Virgin just cutting great versions of deleted scenes and gag reels and footage. There's nothing worse than when you create something and it just disappears never to be seen again, so I worked really hard to get Freaks and Geeks and Undeclared out there.

Luckily, Shout! Factory is the type of place that is willing to take a chance and put us out because we're not cheap to put out; they have to clear a lot of music and they do their best to get everything. It was a real risk for them to put out Freaks and Geeks; they paid for a million dollars' worth of music for a show that got canceled after thirteen or fourteen episodes aired. There was certainly no great evidence that they would climb out of that hole so the fact that it did well and allowed us to do Undeclared was really gratifying.

IGN DVD: Do you have any plans for an Undeclared soundtrack like the one released for Freaks and Geeks?
Apatow: We never talked about doing an Undeclared soundtrack. I don't know; we'd have to see how well the DVD does. But there was great music on the show, and the score was done by Joey Santiago, the lead guitarist for the Pixies, and it's an amazing score. It's just way too good for the show. It's like a lost Pixies album. We put it on all of the menus so any time you hit a menu it plays a different Joey Santiago cue.

IGN DVD: So your next project is finishing up the DVD for 40 Year-Old Virgin?
Apatow: We're finishing that up and the movie comes out on the 19th, and it came out really well. I'm just excited for people to see it; sometimes I refer to it as the best episode ever of Undeclared, because when I shot it I tried to shoot it with the same approach that we took when we made Undeclared: the visuals are somewhat simple, but we allowed the actors to take their time and improvise and really own their characters.

[Also,] when we were casting Undeclared, I just looked for funny kids and then I wrote the show after I found them, and that's how we did 40 Year-Old Virgin; we looked for funny friends for the virgin to help him in his cause, and one of them was Seth Rogen, who was also a co-producer on the movie, and he's just so funny that it's great to force him to come to the set every day and pitch jokes to everybody.

I'm producing a movie - I'm going to North Carolina next week - and it's called High, Wide and Handsome and it's the follow-up to Anchorman. it was written by Will Ferrell and Adam McKay and directed by Adam McKay and it's about a NASCAR legend.

IGN DVD: Is that the same thing as Talladega Nights?
Apatow: The name has changed. We're about to shoot that in September.

IGN DVD:Is it the same kind of immersive, comic world that made up Anchorman, or is it more realistic in its depiction of NASCAR?
Apatow:[/b] I'm sure we will think it's going to be more real-world based and then it will come out in like an Anchorman world.

IGN DVD: Speaking of Anchorman, how did the idea for a separate DVD-release movie come about?
Apatow: That was the original plot and we tested it and it didn't test well; but we thought it was hilarious but maybe a little too sophisticated compared to other aspects of the movie; I mean, it was making fun of the SLA (Symbionese Liberation Army), and not many people are thinking about the SLA these days (laughs).

So we shot some different scenes where she falls in the bear cage at the zoo. And then we just had so many scenes we couldn't put in the movie, Adam said, 'what if we just cut all of these scenes together and make another movie and use crazy Bill Curtis voiceover to force it to make some kind of sense. It's an alternate universe version of the movie. Although, none of the jokes are the same; even though the chronology is the same, nothing is identical - we made a point of doing that.

Actually, we had some scenes that are among our favorites and some that we like better than in the real movie, that are just so odd and self-indulgent that you couldn't put them in the real movie. But you could put a five-minute scene of how much Dave Koechner loves Will Farrell and wants to marry him and what he wants to do with him sexually, and you could put that in an alternate movie.

theshark8777 · 08-13-2005, 11:01 PM

I picked this DVD up today (Undeclared). I remember watching it when it was on Fox. I don't think it's as good as Freaks and Geeks, but definitely worth watching!

Jack Gomez · 08-13-2005, 11:07 PM

Great interview! Huge fan of Judd Apatow. I've liked pretty much everything he's been involved with. Pre-ordered my Undeclared dvd set about a month ago so hopefully it'll be here this week. Can't wait!

theshark8777 · 08-13-2005, 11:08 PM

Brad, did you get his new book. I almost bought it a couple weeks ago, it looked pretty funny.

AKA · 08-13-2005, 11:09 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by theshark8777

Brad, did you get his new book. I almost bought it a couple weeks ago, it looked pretty funny.

Haven't gotten around it it yet, but I hear it's great.

vashti1999 · 08-13-2005, 11:25 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by theshark8777

I picked this DVD up today (Undeclared). I remember watching it when it was on Fox. I don't think it's as good as Freaks and Geeks, but definitely worth watching!

Unlike F&G, which I blind bought on dvd, I did watch Undeclared when it aired on Fox and remember liking it, so I'm happy to see it's coming out.

theshark8777 · 08-13-2005, 11:29 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by vashti1999

Unlike F&G, which I blind bought on dvd, I did watch Undeclared when it aired on Fox and remember liking it, so I'm happy to see it's coming out.

Same with me, somehow I missed F&G when it first aired but loved it when I saw it on DVD. Undeclared I did catch, probably because it was on Fox, and at the time, I watched alot of FOX. That was around the time Titus was on.

vashti1999 · 08-15-2005, 03:49 PM

I just received a single preview disc from Shout! as opposed to the complete set, so I'll be out to buy my copy tomorrow. I just finished watching all of the eps on the preview disc: 5 eps plus a director's cut of one of them. The show is funny and it looks good. It's tough having Freaks and Geeks in the back of my mind while watching Undeclared, but it was as fun as I remember it. One weird thing I noticed is that though the eps are from 2001, there are 2000 copyright dates at the end of the eps.

theshark8777 · 08-15-2005, 03:54 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by vashti1999

I just received a single preview disc from Shout! as opposed to the complete set, so I'll be out to buy my copy tomorrow. I just finished watching all of the eps on the preview disc: 5 eps plus a director's cut of one of them. The show is funny and it looks good. It's tough having Freaks and Geeks in the back of my mind while watching Undeclared, but it was as fun as I remember it. One weird thing I noticed is that though the eps are from 2001, there are 2000 copyright dates at the end of the eps.

I agree with the F&G and undeclared comparison, its hard not to, even though they are not the same show. I have almost completed the first disc (thank god my best buy likes to put DVDs out early). Louden Wainright is so strange in that show.

Jack Gomez · 08-16-2005, 12:33 PM

According to the official Undeclared site the episodes on the dvd set are in the wrong order: http://www.undeclaredonline.com/dvd/insert.html

Quote:

Friends,

I hate to say it, but we made a mistake. The episodes are not in the proper order. How does that happen? Well, the network ran them in random order, so we started shooting them without too much concern for episode order, and then when it was time to make this DVD we got confused. But fear not, below is the preferred order of episodes for Undeclared for your enjoyment. But if you like the current crazy order, more power to you.

Best,
Judd Apatow

1. Prototype
2a. Oh, So You Have A Boyfriend?
2b. Full Bluntal Nugety
3. Eric Visits
4. Job, Jobs, Jobs
5. Sick In The Head
6. The Assistant
7. Addicts
8. God Visits
9. Parent's Weekend
10. Eric Visits Again
11. Rush and Pledge
12. Hell Week
13. Truth or Dare
14. The Day After
15. The Perfect Date
16. Hal and Hilary
17. Eric's POV

Kind of annoying but at least the series is out there on dvd.

08-13-2005, 01:03 PM	#1
AKA Member Forum Star Join Date: Dec 17, 2001 Posts: 15,746	Interview with Judd Apatow ("Freaks And Geeks," "Undeclared") Thought this was appropriate for this forum, since his TV shows (The Ben Stiller Show, Freaks And Geeks and now Undeclared) have found a second life on DVD. Judd Apatow **The Undeclared* creator discusses his new DVD, The 40 Year-Old Virgin, and his future in films and television.*** By Todd Gilchrist IGN August 12, 2005 - Judd Apatow might just be Hollywood's most successful failure. Like few other TV writers and producers working today, he has seen more projects canceled than continued (think The Ben Stiller Show, The Critic, Freaks and Geeks among others), and yet maintains a position as one of the industry's most acclaimed, respected and sought-after artists. Thankfully, DVD has offered him a second chance to find appreciative audience for his programs: Freaks and Geeks was released last year with a flurry of attention, vindicating the show as a great chronicle of teen angst; and now he's hoping that the same mania will claim viewers again with the release of Undeclared. IGN recently caught with Apatow via phone to discuss the release of Undeclared on DVD. In addition to his comments about the celebrated, ratings-deficient show, he reveals a few secrets about the forthcoming 40 Year-Old Virgin DVD, and explains how the making of Anchorman gave birth to not one but two full-length feature films. IGN DVD: How's everything today, Judd? Judd Apatow: Good, good. We've got the [40 Year-Old Virgin] movie coming out next week. It's one of those ones that oddly fell into place and came out well, and isn't a nightmare. IGN DVD: How much are you having to juggle that and the promotion for the Undeclared DVD set? Apatow: Well, I timed Undeclared to come out the week before the movie came out so every time anyone asks me about Virgin, I can push the Undeclared DVD. I'm doing press junkets this weekend, and we're trying to get some people to pay attention. IGN DVD: When you first started Undeclared, did you approach the show any differently given the fact that Freaks and Geeks, your other, similarly-themed series, was ultimately cancelled? Apatow: Well, we thought if we did a show that was half and hour instead of an hour and was more of a comedy than a drama… actually, we used to say that Freaks and Geeks was a drama that had comedy in it, and we said that this was a comedy that had some drama in it! Flip the 60-40 percentages, with more comedy than drama, and we could do something fun because high school is inherently painful for a lot of people, but college is the reward for having survived. So we thought this was a way to do something that would be different because the setting is different but our approach to the work would be the same, to be honest and truthful and revealing. IGN DVD: When you went back to revisit the material, was there anything you insisted be included to make sure that audiences understood the show better, or could appreciate it more? Apatow: Well, there was this episode that never aired called "God Visits, which was about Steven getting approached by one of the Christian groups and getting really into it, and at the same time, Charlie Hunnam's character Lloyd gets flipped out by a philosophy professor who's teaching existentialism. It was a fun episode that never aired - of course they promised us it would air - because I thought, 'how could you not air an episode? You paid for it! How would it be better not to air it?' But apparently there was some financial motivation for not airing an episode they paid for. So it's great that's on the DVD, and there's also an episode that we shot two versions of. What happened was we shot six episodes because at the time, Fox was in dire straits and didn't have any hit shows. So they ordered six episodes before even seeing a pilot, and by the time we finished the six, they had a bunch of hit shows. They didn't need us, so they didn't air the first episode until almost ten or eleven months after we shot it. But in that time, everyone was sitting around thinking a little too much about how the episodes were, and they asked for some adjustments in some of the episodes, and one of the episodes was about taking the girl he likes, Lizzie, to a Ted Nugent lecture. I guess maybe they found that a little too obscure a concept, so we shot another version of the date where they go see American Pie outside. We liked both of them equally, but it was one of those things where we said 'well, if the network will like us more and not cancel us as quickly if we listen to some of their thoughts, then let's do it.' Of course, that didn't work at all and they canceled us one episode quicker than Freaks and Geeks, after promising that they would never do that to us, and that NBC was a bunch of fools, and then they do the exact same thing. So that I'm excited about, and then there's a Loudon Wainwright concert on the DVD that we videotaped in Los Angeles that I think is amazing and is worth the price of the DVD right there. It has a lot of funny, bitter, sweet songs that have inspired my work for a long time. IGN DVD: So what ultimately do you think led to the demise of the show? Apatow: Well, when I'm working I just try to do what I think is truthful and funny and I don't pay too much attention to the trends. We did experiment with different types of episodes - some were broader than others, some had more dramatic moments than others - but I think it's really hard to launch a show three weeks after 9/11. It made us feel foolish talking about our little show after that happened. We were supposed to air I think the 26th of September, and then 9/11 happened, and it definitely knocks out all of your press, because no one's talking about new TV shows, but you do end up airing mid-October, and I don't know if people are in the mood to laugh at some silly new show. I think a lot of people went back to their old favorites; when you're terrified, you go back to your old friends - you're not in an experimental mode - and it also messed up all of the networks' schedules. It changed when the World Series was, it had a lot of effects on the schedule that year, and at the same time it was real hard to try to be funny after that. It was difficult writing and producing the show in the shadow of that. But then as I say in the liner notes on the DVD, I saw Garry Trudeau on Nightline, and he was talking about how hard it was to write Doonesbury after 9/11, and about how he wasn't sure if there was any purpose to what he does for a living. He slowly realized that he does make an important contribution to society even if it's only making people happy for a very brief moment during the day and making them think a little bit, and that was inspiring to me and helped us get our groove back. But it affected our ability to launch the show, and they give you very little time to get traction, so it's hard to say why we didn't. I've always felt most good shows take a little while to find their audience, especially comedies. IGN DVD: What did you learn from the experiences of making Freaks and Geeks and Undeclared that you took to future projects? Apatow: It taught me to make movies (laughs). It [led] me to make Anchorman and The 40 Year-Old Virgin - that's what it led me to - or make shows for basic cable or HBO or Showtime. That's how I would do it next time, because I don't want to change what I do or how I see things. It's also a sad fact that these shows are getting shorter and shorter because they're adding more commercials and promos, and a 'half hour' show is about 21 minutes of story, and over the years for five or six minutes of story to disappear, it changes the whole idea of a half-hour comedy. It's hard to take your time with that limitation. It was much easier on Freaks and Geeks to just sit there and have three kids talking on a street corner for like three or four minutes. You can't do that in a half-hour show; it rushes you a little bit. What's your favorite of the Undeclared episodes, or the one that you're proudest of? Apatow: I'm proud of the fact that the pilot is so strong. It has a lot of personal ideas in it; I had a long distance relationship during college, and it's got some funny, honest jokes about that, and I think it's a pretty good pilot where there's a kid coming to school and his parents decide to get divorced the second he leaves, as if they've been waiting for that moment his whole childhood, and then a girl who has a long-distance boyfriend has sex with him in spite of her boyfriend back home (laughs). It's an idea I'm proud of, and I think it launched a funny relationship of trying to get that girl to ever do it with you again. I like the episode with Will Ferrell where he plays a speed freak who will write your term paper for fifty bucks. Will did that when he was finishing up his last season on Saturday Night Live, and it was fun to do an episode with him and have fun with him as an actor, because at that point it was before Old School or Elf or any of those things. We were just very lucky to have fun and play with him before he got big. I also think that the "Truth or Dare" episode that Seth Rogen wrote. It's just a great, funny episode where they try to plan everything they're going to say in advance in a Truth or Dare game with the girls they like. It just works really well, and any time something really comes together and all of the pieces fit it's pretty exciting. IGN DVD: How much has DVD become sort of a second chance for your shows to find an audience after their network runs have ended? Apatow: I've always loved the DVD format and I look forward to getting anything I do out on DVD. Right now we're working on the 40 Year-Old Virgin DVD, and I'll work for months with an editor just for the DVD of The 40 Year-Old Virgin just cutting great versions of deleted scenes and gag reels and footage. There's nothing worse than when you create something and it just disappears never to be seen again, so I worked really hard to get Freaks and Geeks and Undeclared out there. Luckily, Shout! Factory is the type of place that is willing to take a chance and put us out because we're not cheap to put out; they have to clear a lot of music and they do their best to get everything. It was a real risk for them to put out Freaks and Geeks; they paid for a million dollars' worth of music for a show that got canceled after thirteen or fourteen episodes aired. There was certainly no great evidence that they would climb out of that hole so the fact that it did well and allowed us to do Undeclared was really gratifying. IGN DVD: Do you have any plans for an Undeclared soundtrack like the one released for Freaks and Geeks? Apatow: We never talked about doing an Undeclared soundtrack. I don't know; we'd have to see how well the DVD does. But there was great music on the show, and the score was done by Joey Santiago, the lead guitarist for the Pixies, and it's an amazing score. It's just way too good for the show. It's like a lost Pixies album. We put it on all of the menus so any time you hit a menu it plays a different Joey Santiago cue. IGN DVD: So your next project is finishing up the DVD for 40 Year-Old Virgin? Apatow: We're finishing that up and the movie comes out on the 19th, and it came out really well. I'm just excited for people to see it; sometimes I refer to it as the best episode ever of Undeclared, because when I shot it I tried to shoot it with the same approach that we took when we made Undeclared: the visuals are somewhat simple, but we allowed the actors to take their time and improvise and really own their characters. [Also,] when we were casting Undeclared, I just looked for funny kids and then I wrote the show after I found them, and that's how we did 40 Year-Old Virgin; we looked for funny friends for the virgin to help him in his cause, and one of them was Seth Rogen, who was also a co-producer on the movie, and he's just so funny that it's great to force him to come to the set every day and pitch jokes to everybody. I'm producing a movie - I'm going to North Carolina next week - and it's called High, Wide and Handsome and it's the follow-up to Anchorman. it was written by Will Ferrell and Adam McKay and directed by Adam McKay and it's about a NASCAR legend. IGN DVD: Is that the same thing as Talladega Nights? Apatow: The name has changed. We're about to shoot that in September. IGN DVD:Is it the same kind of immersive, comic world that made up Anchorman, or is it more realistic in its depiction of NASCAR? Apatow:[/b] I'm sure we will think it's going to be more real-world based and then it will come out in like an Anchorman world. IGN DVD: Speaking of Anchorman, how did the idea for a separate DVD-release movie come about? Apatow: That was the original plot and we tested it and it didn't test well; but we thought it was hilarious but maybe a little too sophisticated compared to other aspects of the movie; I mean, it was making fun of the SLA (Symbionese Liberation Army), and not many people are thinking about the SLA these days (laughs). So we shot some different scenes where she falls in the bear cage at the zoo. And then we just had so many scenes we couldn't put in the movie, Adam said, 'what if we just cut all of these scenes together and make another movie and use crazy Bill Curtis voiceover to force it to make some kind of sense. It's an alternate universe version of the movie. Although, none of the jokes are the same; even though the chronology is the same, nothing is identical - we made a point of doing that. Actually, we had some scenes that are among our favorites and some that we like better than in the real movie, that are just so odd and self-indulgent that you couldn't put them in the real movie. But you could put a five-minute scene of how much Dave Koechner loves Will Farrell and wants to marry him and what he wants to do with him sexually, and you could put that in an alternate movie.

08-13-2005, 11:01 PM	#2
theshark8777 Hats for Bats Forum Veteran Join Date: Jan 23, 2001 Location: northeast Ohio. Posts: 5,315	I picked this DVD up today (Undeclared). I remember watching it when it was on Fox. I don't think it's as good as Freaks and Geeks, but definitely worth watching!
	__________________ Who ate all the pecan Sandies??

08-13-2005, 11:07 PM	#3
Jack Gomez Felipe's son Forum Regular Join Date: Oct 18, 2003 Posts: 614	Great interview! Huge fan of Judd Apatow. I've liked pretty much everything he's been involved with. Pre-ordered my Undeclared dvd set about a month ago so hopefully it'll be here this week. Can't wait!

08-13-2005, 11:08 PM	#4
theshark8777 Hats for Bats Forum Veteran Join Date: Jan 23, 2001 Location: northeast Ohio. Posts: 5,315	Brad, did you get his new book. I almost bought it a couple weeks ago, it looked pretty funny.

08-15-2005, 03:49 PM	#8
vashti1999 NY METS - #1 Forum Fanatic Join Date: Oct 14, 2003 Location: The world's greatest city - New York City Posts: 11,404	I just received a single preview disc from Shout! as opposed to the complete set, so I'll be out to buy my copy tomorrow. I just finished watching all of the eps on the preview disc: 5 eps plus a director's cut of one of them. The show is funny and it looks good. It's tough having Freaks and Geeks in the back of my mind while watching Undeclared, but it was as fun as I remember it. One weird thing I noticed is that though the eps are from 2001, there are 2000 copyright dates at the end of the eps.