Seth Rogen at the 2011 Toronto International Film Festival (QMI file photo)

When Seth Rogen looks at movies, he's got his eyes peeled for voids he can fill.

High-school comedies were too slick, so he and writing partner Evan Goldberg penned Superbad. Superhero movies had started to take themselves a bit too seriously, so they tackled The Green Hornet (more on how that worked out later).

His latest film, 50/50, a buddy comedy that deals with cancer, is different.

Directed by Jonathan Levine and written by Rogen's pal Will Reiser, 50/50 dramatizes Reiser's experience after he was diagnosed with a cancerous tumour. Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays the Reiser character, Adam, and Rogen plays Adam's best friend Kyle.

While Adam struggles with his illness and contemplates the very real possibility of dying, Kyle cracks jokes and tries to use his friend's illness to pick up girls.

"I remember in high school, we looked at high-school movies and we said, 'None of these feel like what our high school experience was about,' " Rogen says during an interview at the Toronto International Film Festival.

"We thought it would be fun to make (Superbad) be like what our high school experience was like."

The same thing is true of 50/50. After Will got sick and then recovered, Rogen realized there was no movie that represented what their experience with cancer and mortality had been like.

"All those (cancer) movies were very sad and sentimental and emotional and our experience wasn't like that," he says thoughtfully. "It was at times. But it was also very funny and ultimately very uplifting. We thought it would be worthwhile to make a movie that represented, tonally at least, what we went through."

So, along with Goldberg, who is one of the film's producers, Rogen convinced Reiser to turn his story into a screenplay, with some embellishments. The real-life Rogen didn't use his friend's sickness to try and get dates, and Reiser did not fall for his therapist, played in the movie by Anna Kendrick.

"We wanted to show that, yes, it's about a guy who has cancer, but it's also a really enjoyable experience to watch."

The funnyman knows that a film about cancer is a potentially risky proposition, but he isn't worried how fans might take this seemingly more grown-up role.

"I think a lot of people who work creatively are always working towards some goal and," he pauses, "if there's anything we've done well it's not that."

He and Reiser were more worried about what to call the film.

"The original title was, 'I'm With Cancer,' which, as a creatively rambunctious person, is easy to get behind," he says, issuing his distinctive laugh. "But as a realistic person, it's a potentially repellent title. It would have been crazy for us to go to the lengths we went through to make a universally appealing movie and then give the film a repellent title."

So their goal became coming up with a marquee name that wouldn't turn people off.

"50/50 was the best we could do," he says, with a shrug. "I'm not saying there aren't better titles out there, but I will say 50/50 is not repellent, which is all I was going for."

Convincing a studio to bankroll the project meant working with a smaller budget than Rogen and Goldberg had done on their last film, the $100-million plus Green Hornet. And, as it turns out, it's a scale he's more comfortable working on.

"I think if we learned anything from Green Hornet it's that we function better in a smaller scale world," he says. "I think creatively we are (better suited) to a world that is in the double digits and single digits than in triple digits of millions."

His next film, co-written by Goldberg, is a horror comedy, The Apocalypse, with Jay Baruchel and James Franco.

"It's about a bunch of actors stuck in a house after the apocalypse happens," he says chuckling. "We will actually be playing ourselves. So I will actually be playing Seth Rogen, the actor."

mark.daniell@canoe.ca

 

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