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 Seth Rogen |
CULVER CITY, Calif. -- How many 14-year-olds who write a screenplay ever see it made into a major feature film? None, right?
Wrong. Vancouverite Seth Rogen has done it, with Superbad.
Rogen is Hollywood's new comedy "it boy," thanks not so much to his screenwriting efforts but his star acting turns.
He played the porn-loving, pot-smoking stereo-store worker in The 40 Year Old Virgin, and the slacker who impregnates Katherine Heigl after a one-night stand in this summer's raunchy hit comedy Knocked Up.
The fame clearly has changed his professional life. His personal life? Not so much.
"Career-wise, it's made everything go much more smoothly, I would say," Rogen, 25, said last week inside a sound stage at Culver Studios, where he was doing interviews for the new movie Superbad, along with co-writer Evan Goldberg and producer Judd Apatow (Knocked Up, The 40 Year Old Virgin).
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"In my actual day-to-day life, you know, maybe four people ask to take pictures with me every day. That occupies maybe two and a half minutes, so I don't consider that life-changing, really ... It hasn't affected my Halo score."
Rogen's previous acting and writing credits also include TV's critically acclaimed Freaks And Geeks and Undeclared.
It was while he and Goldberg were students at Point Grey High School in Vancouver that they penned the Superbad script, a raunchy high school comedy along the lines of Fast Times At Ridgemont High. Goldberg was 13 when they started writing. Some 12 years later, the duo -- whose careers have been mentored by the super-hot Apatow -- get to see the movie finally hit theatres on Friday.
"I mean, (our pals) have known since high school that we were writing this movie -- we told everyone," Rogen said. "So it was really weird when ... finally, 10 years later, it's actually happening! But everyone seems psyched. Like, 30 of our friends are coming to the premiere from Vancouver."
Apatow, who was first presented with the Superbad script by the then-18-year-old Rogen back when he was writing scripts for and starring in Undeclared, said he liked it immediately. It just took time to get the project greenlit.
"It was really funny then. We just couldn't convince anyone to make it, because no one wanted to make R-rated comedies starring unknown teens," Apatow said. "But Seth kept saying to me, 'This is the kind of movie me and my friends wish somebody would make.' And I always believed that he was right, and that if a movie was really uncensored it potentially could break through in a big way. But I'm just proud of the fact that I didn't throw it in a drawer, after failing to get it made for so many years. This is our Ghandi."
Rogen and Goldberg, who were huge fans of the movies growing up in Vancouver, even went so far as to name Superbad's leads after themselves -- with the foul-mouthed, sex-obsessed Seth played by Jonah Hill (Knocked Up, Evan Almighty) and the sweeter if still horny Evan portrayed by Michael Cera (Arrested Development).
Both characters, whose dual pursuits of booze and women propel the film's plot, are supposed to be 18 in the film. Rogen got his real-life friend Hill to play his part, even though Hill is only one year younger.
"When you know him, it's clear he's not 18," said Rogen, who ended up portraying an out-of-control cop in Superbad, with Saturday Night Live's Bill Hader as his crazed partner.
"But then we saw a lot of guys who just weren't doing what we wanted out of the role. And then we started thinking, 'Maybe he doesn't look too old.' We had since cast Michael Cera, who is actually 18, so we realized when you put them together Jonah kind of looks younger. And it actually works. It was just really important to us that they actually looked like high school guys."
Rogen and Goldberg had about 30 of their friends sign releases so their names could be used in the film, too.
Most memorably is Fogell, the third lead character in the film (played by scene-stealing newcomer Christopher Mintz-Plasse), who gets a fake I.D. under the name McLovin' and ends up having the night of his life when the two cops take him under their wing.
"I think that was a good indication that we maintained good relationships with everyone we went to high school with, because pretty much everyone signed their releases, and we knew pretty much all of them still," Rogen said.
"Except a few bastards didn't," Goldberg added, jokingly.
The cop characters were in the original script and grew out of Rogen's and Goldberg's imagining of what was happening to their confiscated stash when they were kids.
"Cops would always take our beer and s--- when we were in high school, and the joke was always, 'I bet they take our beer and they go drink it in the parking lot afterward,' " Rogen said. "And then we just thought, 'What if they do? That'd be funny to watch.' "
Superbad is rated R in the States but so far in Canada has received 14A ratings in Ontario and Manitoba. The comedy features extremely foul language, and even a hilarious vignette of penis drawings, but, strangely, no female nudity.
Director Greg Mottola (The Daytrippers) said that was intentional.
"That was a conscious choice to not do the sort of Porky's thing there, with the girls in the locker-room scene, just because we have just seen that a lot. And in a way we kind of felt we could go further with how disgusting the language was if we didn't also have gratuitous topless girls. I actually think the studio would have been happy if we had more gratuitous topless girls, and probably fewer cartoons of penises."
Added Rogen, who said he never was obsessed with drawing penises as a child, as his character is in the film: "That was merely an excuse to have beautifully illustrated penis drawings in the movie. We just thought, 'I'd love to see a Tiananmen Square penis! How do we write that into the movie?'"
It turns out Goldberg's brother David, a lawyer in real-life, drew all of the so-called penis pictures.
"We might release a book of them, actually," Rogen said. "A coffee(-table) penis book."
Added Goldberg: "I'm saying animated HBO series."