Judd Apatow’s life as art in This Is 40

DAVE ITZKOFF

NYT SYNDICATE

THE set of a Judd Apatow movie can sometimes feel like a day care centre for children and adults alike. On an August day in 2011, Apatow, the writer, director and baby sitter in chief on comedies like Knocked Up, was preparing at a Brentwood mansion to shoot his new film, This Is 40.

While his wife, the actress Leslie Mann, was working on a scene with Paul Rudd and Albert Brooks, Apatow’s younger daughter, Iris, was showing off the brace on her sprained ankle, and his older daughter, Maude, was asking if she could go with some friends to Chinatown. In the backyard John Lithgow was jumping on a trampoline, and the rock musician Graham Parker was strumming on a guitar.

Spread across this playing field are all the components of Apatow’s life: his aspirations, obsessions and anxieties; trusted collaborators, artistic heroes and even his relatives. As a result when Universal releases This Is 40 on December 21, it will be the most personal film Apatow has made to date. It is not only a movie that steers away from the wild or unsettled single men of his earlier efforts (like The 40-Year-Old Virgin), but also one he has created in close collaboration with his wife, who stars in it along with their daughters.

If those are not sufficient indications of Apatow’s investment in the project, there is also the sting he is certain he would feel if audiences rejected the film.

“ T h e r e ’ s n o t h i n g w o r s e than spilling your guts and having people hate it,” he said with a sardonic chuckle. “‘Oh, that’s your world? Wow, I don’t like the movie or you.”’ As he explained his thinking behind This Is 40, speaking in September at the West Los Angeles office his employees call the Apatower, he said: “Here’s my family, here’s my marriage, here’s my job. Are we happy with where we’re at? Can we make it better?” The comedy in that, he said, arises “when you try really hard to control it all, and that always comes back and smacks you in the face.” Despite his tendency to personalise the plot, Apatow says the movie is not really about him and the three-quarters of his nuclear family who appear in it.

In This Is 40, Apatow revisits Pete and Debbie (played by Rudd and Mann), the middle-aged parents introduced in Knocked Up, as they are barraged with commonplace predicaments: Is Pete’s business failing? Can Debbie be both a friend and a boss to her employees? Can they raise their children (played by Maude and Iris Apatow) and navigate relationships with their own parents? Is this a haemorrhoid? Apatow said this intimate specificity – inspired by reality, if not lifted from it – was necessary to connect with the wide audience he seeks.

“People never walk out of the movie and think it’s about us,” Apatow said.

“They always think it’s about them.” Dating to the births of their daughters, Maude, now 14, and Iris, 10, Apatow said, he sought to convince Mann that there was a memorable comedy in their prenatal adventures.

“All sorts of crazy, terrifying, hilarious things were happening,” said Apatow, 44, who has the scruffy beard and cheerful manner of a satisfied satyr. “I would say, ‘ Y o u think we should make a movie about this?’ And I would pray she would say yes.” Some of these details found their way into Knocked Up, Apatow’s 2007 hit (which sold nearly $220 million in tickets worldwide) starring Katherine Heigl and Seth Rogen as singles contending with an unexpected pregnancy.

Mann, 40, slender and chic, said that in her husband’s confessional comedies were a welcome antidote to what she said was her “very shy, kind of pentup” youth and “WASPy” upbringing. During the making of Knocked Up she provided notes to make sure the women were represented as fairly as the men. (A scene in which Rogen’s character blanches at having sex with Heigl’s character while she is pregnant was Mann’s suggestion.) In the presence of their children Apatow and Mann are doting, boo-boo-kissing parents.

However, when it is just the two of them (and a reporter), the dynamic is different: they joke around and tease each other affectionately, but also hang expectantly on each other’s sentences. As Apatow explained, they had only just started discussing the finished version of This Is 40 with each other, let alone with interviewers.

With her husband seated next to her, Mann said she was concerned that other romantic comedies did not depict domestic squabbles and their aftermaths as she was used to them.

“I’m so sick of seeing these movies where married couples are just cuddling on the couch and caressing each other’s faces,” she said, adding, with a laugh, “I’m like, ‘Maybe it does happen, and maybe there’s something wrong with us.”’ (“I want to cuddle you for the rest of this interview,” Apatow told her.) So Apatow created a story for the Pete and Debbie characters that would show what his understanding of marriage looked like while giving him and Mann a creative place to work out innermost feelings.

When he is talking about what Pete might do in a situation, “it’s just a coded way for me to say, ‘I feel this way,”’ Apatow said. “It allows us to have a very intimate conversation about other people.” As his screenplay developed around these conversations, it incorporated experiences he and Mann have dealt with – say, his sneaking off to the bathroom to play games on his iPad – and comic exaggerations of true circumstances; other personal issues were deliberately omitted.

“I have vague memories of not wanting to talk about certain things,” Mann said to Apatow, “like your things.” He replied, “Well, don’t talk about them here.” Rudd was also invited to participate in conversations and videotaped improvisations, as was his wife, Julie. He said he did not mind involving his spouse (who is not a performer) and found it therapeutic.

“It seems like you’re having some sort of couples’ therapy, but it’s viewed by millions of people in movie theatres across the world,” Paul Rudd said.

Still, he said it was inevitable that personal dialogue crept into these sessions and into the movie.

“It’s like, why not say it now?” Rudd asked. “God knows it’s true that it could actually happen. Because it did.” Maude and Iris Apatow too are playing expanded versions of their Knocked Up roles – not just wisecracking moppets this time but characters who are integral to the plot. Though they have all but grown up on their father’s movie sets, this latest assignment could be a more problematic blend of fact and fiction, and open them up to critiques that grown-ups are more accustomed to.

Apatow said he shoots with his daughters only during the summer and that they are “not encouraged” to act in other people’s films. But he said he felt they were ready for some of these challenges and that it was important that they received this exposure to the family business.

“I’ve tried to explain to them why we do it,” he said. “This is what creative people do. They share their lives, they let other people see that they feel the same things as them – that we’re all in this together.” Maude Apatow, who is a burgeoning blogger and used to shrugging off online criticism on Twitter, said in response to email questions that she was glad to be included in This Is 40. “I would have felt bad if I was replaced by some other kid who looks a little like me,” she wrote.

But in some scenes – like a fight with her on-screen parents, after her character has been forbidden to use Wi-Fi – she said it was hard to keep her authentic emotions out of the movie.

“Sometimes I am not acting,” she wrote. “I forget we are acting and I just get irritated for real. Who takes away the Wi-Fi?” On the other hand, she said, she was proud of her work in a scene in which she had to lose her temper, cry and curse at Mann. “My mom taught me how to commit to the scene, which helped me a lot,” Maude wrote. “Nobody commits harder than my mom.”