Writer/director/producer Judd Apatow found huge success with his two previous directorial efforts, The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up. He’s looking to go 3-for-3 with Funny People.

It’s always a little awkward meeting a new roommate. More so if the new guy keeps asking to see your penis so that he knows “what I’m dealing with.”

It was a rude hello that marked the beginning of a lifelong friendship for Judd Apatow and the irrepressible “new kid” Adam Sandler.

That opening line — from the days when the comedy-director/super-producer and the king of frat-boy comedies were both struggling standup comics — found its way into the script of Funny People, Apatow’s third movie as a director, and the first with his old roomie. In fact, it’s a recurring motif between Sandler and his Funny People co-star Seth Rogen.

That might get you thinking that there’s a bit of Sandler’s real life in the seriocomic film about an A-list comedy star named George Simmons, who rethinks his life after a potentially terminal cancer diagnosis. Feeling creatively empty and unloved as he faces death, George latches onto a raw open-miker named Ira (Rogen) and hires him as a joke-writer/assistant and surrogate friend. He also tries to rekindle a long-lost romance with Laura (Apatow’s real-life wife, Leslie Mann).

“The thing is, George’s career is very fan-friendly, he’s not trying to be Richard Pryor. He’s not trying to change the face of comedy. He’s just trying to make people laugh,” Apatow says. “When he gets sick, he doesn’t know if all the effort he put into being a movie star is worth the price he paid. He’s isolated himself and he doesn’t have anybody to help him out when time gets tough.”

Not to get melodramatic or anything, but does that sound like Sandler’s life in any way?

“Well, there’s little pieces of truth everywhere in the movie. What’s funny is when I watch it now, I think I’m more like George than anybody. I used to think I was Ira, but I think I’ve turned into George, sad as that may sound. Adam and I have talked about it a lot, like this is what we could have turned into if we hadn’t got married and had women beat us into shape.”

Apatow and Sandler took wildly separate paths after they divvied up their stuff and went their separate ways. Sandler’s path as a “billion-dollar box-office” guy is pretty well known: Saturday Night Live, Billy Madison, Happy Gilmore, Big Daddy, high-concept comedies such as I Now Pronounce You Chuck And Larry and Click, and occasional forays into “serious” films such as Punch Drunk Love and Reign Over Me.

Apatow, meanwhile, dropped standup comedy for a long and unrewarding career as a sitcom “show-runner” (the critically acclaimed Freaks & Geeks and Undeclared) before becoming one of the greatest late-bloomers in Hollywood history. His first attempt at directing a feature — The 40-Year-Old Virgin — was both a huge hit and a critical success, a combination industry observers had almost dismissed as impossible. The acclaim heated up even more with his second effort Knocked Up.

The sizable stable of “friends of Apatow” grew to include not just actors such as Rogen, Michael Cera, Jay Baruchel, Paul Rudd and Jason Segel, but a whole school of comedy directors. While he has directed only three movies himself, he has had his imprematur as a producer on almost every comedy that doesn’t involve Eddie Murphy in a fat suit. Among them: Step Brothers, Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Superbad and Talladega Nights: The Ballad Of Ricky Bobby.

I tell Apatow there are now movies he had nothing to do with that are referred to as “Apatow-esque,” such as the “bromance” I Love You, Man or The Ugly Truth, the just-released Katherine Heigl/Gerard Butler film, a smuttier version of a typical romantic comedy, clearly patterning itself off Heigl’s successful turn in Knocked Up.

Apatow graciously accepts the status of adjective.

“I’m just trying to make movies where the theme and the emotions are the most important part of the movie. And then we try to figure out a way to make it funny. It’s an approach I have. We work really hard to make movies about things we really care about. We don’t try to make high-concept comedies. We’re very passionate about what we’re doing and I’m glad that’s catching on.”

Apatow’s years of seeing what he regarded as junk getting greenlit while his career idled finds its expression in the “Hollywood careers” of Funny People’s characters. George turns out to be most famous for movies such as Re-Do (in which he magically turns into a talking baby) or Mer-Man (in which he’s a male mermaid).

Ira’s roommate Mark Taylor Jackson (Jason Schwartzman) lords it over his roomies because he’s starring in a horrendous high school sitcom called Yo, Teach!

Again, Apatow’s not naming any names, particularly not Sandler’s.

“I think they’re meant to show aspects of any modern movie star’s career. I tried to make them real. I didn’t want to do parodies of those movies, I wanted them to be exactly what movies are. It wouldn’t be weird if a movie called Re-Do or Mer-Man or a hot dog competition movie came out next summer. In fact, some of those movies are in active development.

“There’s nothing worse than seeing a movie and realizing the only reason somebody made it was to fill a content pipeline or to get a paycheque. Yo, Teach! was inspired by plenty of things we’ve witnessed — you’d have some goofy friend and suddenly he was making a fortune on a terrible show, and then the show would disappear.”

He does allow that working with Sandler was a “morphing” of two very different comedy styles. “I’ve worked on some of Adam’s movies previously and punched up a few. We always made each other laugh and he turned out to fit well into how we work. He turned out to be great at improvising, even though he doesn’t do much of that when he shoots. It’s fun seeing him in an R-rated movie, one that has more of a realistic, stripped-down feel than he’s done before.

And, as must happen whenever he works, the “friends of Apatow” universe has expanded. Singer-songwriter James Taylor gets to crack a few funny lines (including “F--- Facebook!” at an industry gig for MySpace employees), and Eminem, a.k.a. Marshall Mathers, goes all gangsta on comedian Ray Romano (it’s worth mentioning that Funny People is as good as its name, awash in headliner-calibre standup comic cameos).

How did Apatow round up all the comedians? Facebook could take lessons on networking from Apatow.

“We’ve all known Norm Macdonald forever. Me and Norm used to write jokes for Roseanne when we first started out. And Adam and Norm knew each other from Saturday Night Live. And Adam and Sarah (Silverman) are from the same city, Manchester, New Hampshire. Dave Attell is someone we all look up to, one of the greatest comedians ever.

“And Ray Romano, I was on the HBO Young Comedians special with him in 1982. I think his show was the best sitcom ever, and he’s one of the funniest guys that ever existed. And having him get into an argument with Eminem was priceless.

“Eminem turned out to be very nice. Clearly nothing offends him. He’s hysterical and lot of his music is very funny, and he’s a great actor. He hadn’t acted since 8 Mile, so I’m kind of proud he’s doing it here.”

The film wrapped and the promotion winding down, Apatow confirms it’ll probably be another two years before we see him direct again (with another five or six production credits in between).

“I only want to direct when I’m really inspired,” he says. “It’s fun helping out other people and collaborating. It’s also fun going home at 3 o’clock instead of having to stay until midnight like everybody else. I don’t have the energy to always be directing. And I like directors. I like helping them out and trying to look for problems and being a third eye for them.”

Next up: He’s producing a movie starring musical-comedy YouTube phenom Bo Burnham. “Bo is writing a script right now, so that’s something I’m excited to focus on after the movie comes out. It’s his demented version of a musical that takes place in high school.”

And there’s excitement in Apatow World over Get Him To The Greek, in which manic Brit comic Russell Brand reprises the role of rocker Aldous Snow (now back on drugs), a character that stole scads of scenes in Forgetting Sarah Marshall.

“Nick Stoller (who also did Sarah Marshall) wrote and directed it. On day one on Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Nick said, ‘Oh we have to make an entire movie that’s all about Russell. He’s too funny.’ ”

People are already talking about that movie’s scene-stealing rapper cameo, with Sean (P. Diddy) Combs in a punchout with Colm Meaney.

“Who’d have thought Sean Combs and Eminem would be the two funniest people we met this year?” Apatow says with a laugh.

jim.slotek@sunmedia.ca

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