You met him in “Freak and Geeks” as a smart ass rebellious teenager, saw him in “Undeclared” as the serious business major among his nerdy college friends, but you really got to know and love Seth Rogen in his last two hit comedies directed by Judd Apatow – The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up.
Next up, Rogen stars in Superbad, which he co-wrote and co-executive produced with his childhood friend Evan Goldberg. The Greg Mottola-directed comedy, produced by Apatow, centers on two high school losers (Jonah Hill and Michael Cera) who can’t get girls and are desperately trying to party it up before they graduate. Rogen plays an officer in the film along with Bill Hader.
You’re probably thinking a movie about high school kids trying to buy beer and party… how funny can that be? Well, the guys guarantee it will be filled with raunchy jokes, dirty lines and a truthful view of what it actually means to be in high school. The film is rated a “hard R” and Rogen and Goldberg said even at 12, when they started writing the script, they knew they wanted it to be that crude.
“To us that was the big joke. The injustice in movies was that no one in high school movies truly talked and act how we would in high school,” Rogen explained. “Just the fact that we were in high school and could swear all the time was just a novelty to us. It was the first time you weren’t around your parents all the time or in an elementary school so we would go crazy and have the most filthy conservations. We just hadn’t seen that in movies really.”
“The concept of the whole movie is that these guys are going to buy alcohol and use it to get drunk with. That you can’t even do in a PG-13 movie. It was fundamentally an R rated movie and that’s one of the reasons, because we had a lot of people say if you make it PG-13 we’ll make it because it’s about high school kids and most high school kids are under 18. We were trying to make a realistic image of what we found high school to be like so we would have rather not made it, then made it kind of watered down version of itself. We eventually won out I guess. It took a very long time,” he continued.
“It’s amazing they are [Sony Pictures] letting us go all out,” Goldberg chimed in.
“Yeah they really understand it seems like that it’s just a dirty movie,” Rogen laughed.
And a long time to get their film made is right. While ComingSoon.net hung out with the guys on the set in Northridge, California, we found out exactly how Superbad came about.
According to Rogen, the two met at a Bar Mitzvah class when they were 12 and started working on the script back then.
“It started off very general with stories from our high school experiences and you know we had just begun high school when we started writing it so as we experienced more we added it to the script We took all the craziest things that happened throughout high school and compressed it all into one evening for the movie. It’s not all true, but it’s definitely based on truth for the most part.”
“We saw some terrible movies so we were like ‘let’s try to write one.’ We went upstairs and didn’t have a topic so we agreed we should write about what we know and all we knew is that we hadn’t had sex yet,” Goldberg added.
It’s taken the guys 10 years to get their film made and had several versions of the script, “but the whole idea has never changed. It’s about guys trying to buy alcohol to impress girls who are having a party,” Rogen said.
Continue reading Part 2 of our “Superbad” Set Visit, a Q&A with producer Judd Apatow! »
