Seth and Jonah: Superbad Boys Make Good

We love a good underdog story. Comics Seth Rogen and Jonah Hill made us love 'um in the teen losers-on-a-quest-for-party-booze comedy Superbad which was written by Seth and partner when they were under 15! The guys are great friends in real life and, in the new comedy Funny People, they play roomies who are both stand-up comics in search of their big breaks. Needless to say, the boys could totally relate.

We sat down with the BFF's near the beach in Santa Monica, Ca. to chat about the film, their friendship, competition among comics, Seth's struggle to bring Green Lantern to the screen while Jonah's new film is just buzzing along (comic love/hate comments ensue). We noted that Seth is holding his amazing weight loss and that Jonah is about 1/2 of his former self as well.

TeenHollywood: Seth, Did you ever think you would be the victim of skinny jokes?

Seth: It's nice. I wanna be the victim of every type of comedy. It's lovely. I think we should all make fun of everyone's physical attributes in every way.

TeenHollywood: How much freedom were you guys given to riff and go off book in Funny People?

Seth: There's always a lot of freedom. We've all gotten, I think, just a lot better at it. I think the process has somewhat refined itself throughout the years. I think we all know a little more about what actually makes it into the movie and what is just kind of an exercise in vocal wordplay. We riff, but it's a lot of conversations between the takes. In the improv we'll come up with a bunch of stuff that we'll then kind of revisit and it will be written down.

Jonah: We usually don't have as much time between when the script is ready and shooting and we had a year or so to work with Judd and each other to refine our characters before we started shooting this. Whereas before, we would just kinda start working and then shoot a couple weeks later as opposed to like a year later.

Seth: I will say, yeah, there was probably less just aimless improvising than we would normally do. That was done beforehand.

TeenHollywood: To what extent is the relationship on screen like your own professional competitiveness or like something you've experienced?

Jonah: I definitely saw a lot of my character in other people, specifically a couple people we knew before we were successful in any regard.

Seth: Definitely. If you look at me and Jason (Schwartzman, the third roommate in the film) and Jonah's characters, I don't think any of us are anything like those characters. The dynamic in real life between the three of us could not be any more different than the dynamic in the movie. But I have had friends who were literally up for the same roles as me or vying for the exact same jobs and some subtle, underhanded play might come into the equation like one guy will get a script with a part that's good for another guy and maybe he'll tell him and maybe he won't. These kinds of things happen throughout the years when you and all your friends have the same job, basically. So yeah, we put a lot of that into the movie and that was a lot of the stuff that came up in the conversations leading up to it.

Jonah: An aspect of my character, which I thought was interesting, was how certain people we've met along the way have a joylessness to their comedy writing. For us, we laugh and have a good time while we're doing it, but to some people it's like solving a math equation and they're just joyless. That's why in that writing scene....

Seth: Jonah doesn't seem to be enjoying it.

Jonah: Yeah. He's just at work trying to figure out this math problem.

Seth: To me, what's always funny is when Jonah gets off of stage and he's like, (deadpan voice) "I killed." There's no joy or happiness to it. He's like, "Did you see that? I killed." It's all just a career step to that guy. It's being at work.

Jonah: Some of the most joyless people I've met have been comedians.

Seth: Some of them are really the most famous people in the world.

TeenHollywood: Competition can really erode a romance. Can it erode a friendship?

Seth: Yeah.

Jonah: Competitiveness is one of the biggest things that destroys anything.

TeenHollywood: So then, how do you be competitive without losing the friendship?

Seth: We really aren't competitive with one another. At all. We're not. I can't even watch sports, because I could really not give a s**t who wins. That's how uncompetitive I am. I look at people who watch sports and I think, "Imagine caring who won." I can't even fathom what that would be like.

Jonah: I can't tell you how much joy it legitimately brings me when one of my friends does well. Even if it's something that I would be interested in doing as well. Seth and Schwartzman and I have known each other for a really long time and Schwartzman and Seth were both successful way before I had ever had any success and I just was super-happy for them and knew that if I worked hard, something good would come my way as well.

Seth: It's true. Now that Jonah's making Get Me to the Greek, I'm not jealous. I'm thrilled. It's great. I'm thrilled for Nick, Nick Stoller. I'm thrilled for everyone. It's great when your friends are doing well.

Jonah: If you want your friends to be destroyed, you probably won't succeed. That's like dark and evil, talking about good things coming your way if you wish darkness upon everybody else.

TeenHollywood: I liked the Harry Potter joke in the film. Very timely.

Jonah: We knew it would be coming out. It was sorta an homage to the Spider-Man 3 reference in Knocked Up.

Seth: Yeah. We're always aware of what we're releasing against.

Jonah: We always want one joke at another big summer movie.

TeenHollywood: Seth, your role contains quite a bit of drama as well as comedy. You aren't playing your usual guy. Were you glad about that?

Seth: I thought it was great, you know? I was happy that Judd wanted me to not play the type of guy I would normally play. He was very clear that he really didn't want me to do anything that I normally do in movies. I'm not that dirty in it. I'm not that aggressive. I'm pretty quiet through most of the movie. I really don't even say much in lots of the scenes that I'm in. And I had a really good time doing it. It was different for me and it was nice to be the kind of passive reactor in the scene.

TeenHollywood: Didn't you meet Director Judd Apatow while working on the TV show "Undeclared"? You were a teen, right?

Seth: Yeah. That was the first time I met him was during "Undeclared" and that was great. The fact that he even did that was awesome. Me and Nick Stoller wrote that episode and to us, that was, at the time, I was in my late teens and he was in his early 20s and it was the thrill of a lifetime to have Adam Sandler agree to appear in something you wrote, as a writer who's trying to get started, that's like winning the lottery. So, I would actually think about that a lot, in acting in the scenes, I would think about the time when I was like 17 or 18, I went out to dinner with Judd and Jim Carrey and Garry Shandling and then we all went to go see Gladiator together, so I guess it was in the year 2000, and I think about that a lot.

TeenHollywood: You must have been so star struck.

Seth: I don't think I said one word the entire night. I just had this goofy look on my face. And that's really what I just tried to do for this; put myself in that position.

TeenHollywood: Have you been a mentor yet to a younger writer or comic?

Seth: Yeah. We have friends. We're producing our friend Will's movie, that he wrote. I would never consider myself a mentor, because I would never imply anyone should live their life in any way close to how I live mine. I think as a writer, I can help people develop their ideas and get them to a place where they should be, but I would never consider that mentoring. That's producing, to me.

TeenHollywood: Do you guys feel like you've had specific mentors over the years?

Seth: Yeah, definitely Judd.

Jonah: Judd and Sacha Baron Cohen.

Seth: Yeah, he was really helpful to us, both of us.

Jonah: Those are my two. And Seth and Evan. Not in a mentor, like where I was like, 'Man, I look up to these guys. I want to live my life like them.' I mean, come on. But Seth and Evan, when we made Superbad, were super-inclusive to every part of the process. They were like, 'Hey, come look what we're doing. We're writing, do you want to come write with us?" Just things like that definitely shaped what I wanted to do with my career. And then on Pineapple Express, which I had no involvement in, the same thing. They were like, 'Come write with us' or 'Come watch the movie and give us your thoughts.'

Seth: It's also what Judd did with us. When I was an actor on "Freaks & Geeks," he invited me into the writers room, which no one would do. They try to keep the actors as far away from the writers room as possible on most TV shows, but that's how he did it. He knew people should learn as much as possible. Right now we're making a big movie and not many of our friends have made a movie of this scale, so we're inviting everyone imaginable to come and just see what it's like and give us their ideas and throw in their input and just have them learn from what we're doing and to get all of their ideas in the process.

TeenHollywood: Every time I see you, you have a new update on Green Hornet. Is it ever coming out?

Seth: I've decided we're never gonna make the movie. We're just going to promote it for the next 10 years (laughs, that special, weird Seth laugh).

TeenHollywood: Jonah, might you face similar difficulties making Adventurer's Handbook?

Jonah: Ummm... No. I've actually had the greatest time ever working with Universal on that movie.

Seth: (aside to Jonah) Dick.

Jonah: Literally, it's been the most wonderful experience of my life so far. Like, again, Donna Langley who's responsible as much as Judd is for supporting me from a really young age, she bought the script and I wrote it with two of my best friends and immediately, we wrote one part for Jason Segel and one part for Jason Schwartzman and they both are in it. So that worked out. And we wanted our friend Akiva to direct it and he's directing it. And we wanted Working Title to produce it with me, since it was my first movie...

Seth: I'm so jealous right now.

Jonah: I wanted to bring in a more independent producer to make sure stylistically, it wouldn't get too big and Hollywood, so they let us bring in Anthony Bregman, who produced Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

Seth: We did that too. We got Neal Moritz.

Jonah: And Working Title produced all of the Cohen Brothers movies. It's honestly been a dream. (Seth is scowling) Sorry to be so overwhelmingly positive. But we're going in April and it's incredibly fun and interesting. We worked for three years on the script before we sold it, so it wasn't like we got hired to write a script and had to go from there. We optioned the book three years ago and started going from there. It's been wonderful.

Seth: I'm gonna kill this guy.

Jonah: I've watched them make three or four movies and totally be inclusive with me just as a friend and co-worker to see what they were doing. I learned exactly what not to do.

Seth: By watching me and (his writing partner) Evan.

TeenHollywood: Did you have to practice writing good jokes and then writing jokes badly for the parts of the film where you are supposed to be bombing?

Jonah: I didn't need any help in that department.

Seth: I'd say each of us probably had around an hour of stand-up comedy material, which is a gigantic amount. Honestly, some comedians go their entire careers and don't develop an entire hour of standup comedy material. And we all came up with it over the course of five or six months or something like that. And we would perform. We'd bring in audiences. We built some comedy clubs on stage. We filmed in some actual comedy clubs. We would bring in crowds. and we filmed every second of it and then we would go on stage and some of the jokes did good and some of the jokes did bad and we almost sorted through all of it later and plugged it in where we needed.

TeenHollywood: Did doing all of that stand-up remind you of why you were attracted to comedy in the first place?

Seth: It reminded me of why I wanted to be a comedian and why I stopped doing stand-up comedy. Both of those things. I don't know, Jonah, now that we've stopped doing it for a few minutes, do you have any desire to do it again at all?

Jonah: No. No. It made me appreciate what we get to do every day.

Seth: Yeah. Our jobs are way better than this.

Jonah: To me, it just made me realize how much it was like apples and oranges. They're just different things. Being funny doesn't mean you're going to be a great comedian. Being a great comedian doesn't mean you could pull off a great performance in a movie necessarily. Sometimes people overlap with them and they develop both of those skill-sets, but they're definitely not one and the same.

Jonah: We got a lot for free when we would go up at the Improv, because there'd be college kids who like our movies and we'd get like a free seven minutes of standup...

Seth: And you'd see the guy after us be like, 'F**k. I've been writing these jokes for months and just cuz these a**holes are in a couple movies, they get laughs.' And I felt bad about it, honestly. It's f**ked up.