Part 40 (2/2)

Judd: My Maurice Sendak moment happened with Warren Zevon. I wrote a movie with Owen Wilson in the late nineties and I went to meet with Warren Zevon about scoring it. I was talking about handing it in to the studio and being anxious about getting their notes. And he looked at me like I was crazy for even getting notes, or wanting notes, or caring about what the notes would say. He's like, ”What do you care what they say? That's not what this is about.” And then I just clicked in, like: Oh, that's what it is. And then even as something as silly as The 40-Year-Old Virgin perfectly captured my neurosis, how insecure I felt and how much like a freak I felt. You're just hiding in your cubby, afraid to interact with the world. And as soon as I let go, everything went better. The second I made that adjustment, my career took off. But it took me forever to believe, to get my self-esteem out of the gutter enough to think that my story, my thoughts, were interesting. And I felt that when I watched Her, which is such a personal expression of a worldview and how you feel about other people and relations.h.i.+ps. And then the world rewards you because you went all the way. And it leads to success and an Oscar. Do you look at it that way? Like, Wow, I finally did it all alone, I fully committed?

Spike: It's so complicated. There's so many thoughts and feelings I have about all that. One of which is maybe slightly defensive. Which is: I feel like Her is not a radical departure. Maybe it was, I don't know. But to me, it was just the next step like any next step that came before-following what I had to do. But I have to say, I don't think I could've written Her in my twenties. I don't think I could've written screenplays like that in my twenties because I didn't understand everything you're talking about, in terms of exploring yourself through writing. I couldn't even have written the story you wrote to get into college about all the teachers having s.e.x with you. I don't think I knew how to go that raw. I knew how to explore things I was curious about. My daydreams, my fantasies-as I said, I'm a late bloomer. When I think about certain writers, like the Coen Brothers or Paul Thomas Anderson, they came out writing those things so young. That's incredible to me. But I also want to say that most everything I've done feels personal to me. Even the two movies that I did with Charlie [Kaufman] or the music videos-a music video that would start with a song that Bjrk would send me, and I would try to make it my thing. It's all an extension. They are all personal to me, because that's who I was and what I was interested in and trying to explore at that time. Maybe that's a little defensive. But it's a bit of a defensive answer because, you know, I just finished doing a lot of interviews about the movie and that point was made a lot: This is the first thing that wholly came from me. Which is, you know, true in some ways. But Wild Things feels like it came from the same place, to me.

Judd: There's something about being alone in the woods.

Spike: Yeah, so now that I've been defensive, I'll answer your question. I think Wild Things was the beginning of that. And after Wild Things I went and made a few short films that was like, I wanted to sort of exercise that muscle of having an idea that came purely from my own imagination and my confusion and my excitement and wasn't inspired by something else, that was inspired purely by my gut and heart. I was excited by that. I'm excited by giving myself permission to write what's in my daydreams.

Judd: What do you think people took from Her? Like what do people talk to you about when they say they've connected with the movie?

Spike: Um, what...I'm not sure....I think to answer that question honestly makes me anxious because I'm still recovering from six months of talking about that movie. Maybe I'm a bit fried right now since it's still fresh. It took a lot out of me. But to be clear, I'm so grateful for the response it got, the reception it got. And grateful that I get to make movies and that anyone is interested in talking to me about it in the first place. But it's also complicated just because of how much I've had to talk about the movie and- Judd: The experience of making movies is-if you do work that's personal, you're putting yourself out there in a way that people don't understand. They really don't. I made a movie with my family and it was made up, but it did cut to the core of everything we're debating and worried about and thinking about. And it takes years to recover.

Spike: Yeah. I feel ridiculous to complain about it but I'm just giving myself time to recuperate. Making a movie takes so much out of you, but it also gives you so much. When I lock picture-it's like a relations.h.i.+p ending, and there's something bittersweet about it, too. It's a love relations.h.i.+p in one way, in terms of negotiating what you need from it, and what it needs from you. It's also a parent relations.h.i.+p, in that you can't need too much from it. You have to give to it unconditionally and you have to allow it to be who it is-not to put your needs on it. And then you let it go-it graduates high school and you send it off into the world; you've done everything you can do. When I finished Her, I thought, Okay, I've done everything I can do to give this as much love as I could give it and now it's gonna go off and be what it's gonna be. If it gets loved I'll be proud and if it gets hated it'll hurt, but I also know that what I have done with my friends and collaborators will never change. That is what the movie is to me, that's my relations.h.i.+p with my movie...the experience and life I lived with it.

Judd: It's deeply sad that it ends. If I think about anything I've done-when we made Freaks and Geeks and it ended, I thought: How do I keep these people around? How do I keep these ideas around? I never recovered in a lot of ways. I miss making Funny People. I miss going to see Sandler every day and talking about it. It's devastating. I mean, I come from a divorced family. It's devastating that each experience comes to this...instant violent conclusion, and then you're alone again in your room. So many of those ideas went into Her. I'm such a-I'm fascinated by relations.h.i.+ps, self-help, the struggle we all have, and I thought-in the last thirty-five minutes of that movie, you brought so many ideas together in such an elegant way, that are really hard to capture. The idea of loving your ex, even though it doesn't work. And getting to that place where you feel like you understand why it melted down, and it can't work but...It's like an impossible thing to express. I don't think I've ever seen people talk about it in that way. About letting go and what it means.

Spike: I don't know what to say.

Judd: Am I in the ballpark of what you were exploring?

Spike: For sure, for sure. You know, relations.h.i.+ps are so infinitely complicated. And I think that intimacy is equally so....I was trying to write about all of that, trying to write about it in as complicated a way as I knew how at this time in my life. As you said earlier, every day we're in a different mood and see things differently. And our emotions are so completely convincing to us, so I tried to write about all the confusion of that...but also the way we believe things so truly-the way, there's the moment, you know, where Joaquin is talking about how he is never going to feel anything new again. And he believes it so convincingly and then, the next day, he's believing something totally new. And feeling that with complete conviction that that is true, too. Luckily, we have these irrational emotions, emotions that make life large and-it's just not like this series of rational decisions and logic. It's the magic of it and the poetry of life. I don't know. You saying that definitely moves me. When you're talking about the idea of loving your ex, and being able to hold on to that amidst all the other feelings of being heartbroken or sad or missing something that's gone-something dies when a relations.h.i.+p ends. It is a death because that thing that was the two of you together was alive and now it won't be and the only two people who really knew that thing that was alive are the two of you. No one else knows.

Judd: I think about my girlfriend from high school and all of our dreams at the time and I almost...You know, a lot of times I'm tempted to reach out to her but I don't because it's almost, it's so present. It doesn't feel old. It feels brand-new. I'm always afraid to see exes in front of my wife because I feel like she'll know in my face that I'm as devastated today as I was the day that girl broke up with me. Do you think it sometimes takes making a movie-do you feel like you evolve in your personal issues as a result of making a movie like Her?

Spike: Yes, every movie, I'm working stuff out.

Judd: Joaquin Phoenix is so amazing in Her. It's just so tight on him, and he does so many amazing, funny things. And it's so intimate.

Spike: So many times I felt, I just don't want to cut away from this performance. I just want to sit here on this take and be close and feel him.

Judd: In the writers' room on Larry Sanders, we would always have this debate: Would you rather work with someone who is easy and not as good or someone who is a pain in the a.s.s who is a genius? There were writers in that room that would say, ”I'll take the easy guy, life's too short.” I was always like, ”Nah, you've got to go with the genius.”

Spike: Or you are really lucky if they're a genius and easy to direct, like Meryl Streep or Rooney Mara. They are easy and amazing and they work in a different way. I don't even understand it. Somehow they are both emotionally in tune, totally real in the smallest moments and completely directable and able to make the smallest or biggest adjustment from take to take.

Judd: It's not pure pain. But some of those pure pain people are remarkable.

Spike: Like Gandolfini. He was so raw. It was so exciting to work with him, but it was intense, too. Scary even, because he would get so upset at himself if he did something that felt false. But what he gave me and that character and the movie was a piece of himself. He breathed his life into the film with all his heart and pain and sensitivity. I loved that man.

Judd: Do you ever think, like, you're like the guy in the BMX shop, for so many people? That they look at you as somebody who doesn't follow the rules and lives in this fully creative world and does things differently, and promotes ”newness”?

Spike: I'd be flattered if I was.

Judd: Was Maurice Sendak like that as well?

Spike: For me, for sure. He's a real artist. And to be able to have the kind of friends.h.i.+p and collaboration I had with him was like-you know, a gift for life. He's somebody who's unafraid to be honest in all its messiness. The same thing with Charlie Kaufman. Being friends with Charlie and being able to work with Charlie is hugely inspiring.

Judd: It's like you continue to find that person. When you think of Maurice Sendak, is there a thought or philosophy that immediately comes to mind?

Spike: I met him when I was twenty-six and we worked on a movie that didn't end up happening. And at that point, I really don't think I understood what being an artist meant. He would talk about it often and I would nod. And over the years, we stayed in touch, we stayed close, but it wasn't until the third time he offered me the book that I had the idea I was talking about earlier. I was like thirty-three, and that's when we started working together. And we became close. I just think he was an artist till the day he died. I think now I know what that means in terms of living honestly and creating honestly. Actually, Maurice and Charlie remind me of each other. They're very similar people in terms of their willingness to throw down against anything they think is bulls.h.i.+t. They are not careerists; they are making what they are making because they have to. Out of all the people that have influenced me, those guys are two of the biggest.

Judd: What about something like Jacka.s.s? How do those guys, and that experience, fit into what you're talking about?

Spike: Similarly. I mean, funnily enough, the two guys-so it's me and Johnny Knoxville and Jeff Tremaine that created the show and later the movie, and we are really close, too. I met Knoxville in my early twenties out here in L.A. when we were both figuring out what we were doing. And Jeff I've known since I was twelve. Jeff introduced me to the Ramones, took me to my first hard-core shows in D.C. He was two years older than me. And when he was sixteen, he had a car and we'd build ramps together and skate.

Judd: He sounds like the coolest guy in the world.

Spike: He was cool. Oh, Jeff was cool.

Judd: You're twelve and have a cool fourteen-year-old who showed you all of that stuff. That's a big deal.

Spike: And then I helped Jeff get his first jobs out here. One of them was at the skate magazine where I was working, Big Brother.

Judd: Is that where they did the first Johnny Knoxville getting shot?

Spike: Yeah, it was all through the Big Brother videos. I introduced Knoxville to Jeff. At the time he was doing extra work.

Judd: A professional extra?

Spike: And he also landed a Taco Bell commercial. And he was like, ”I got a Taco Bell commercial!” We were all in our mid-twenties and I introduced Jeff to Knoxville and they started doing stuff for the Big Brother videos. And a few years later, it was Jeff who had the idea to take that and make a TV show out of it. It just came out of what we were already doing. It was natural, what made us laugh in skate videos. We thought if we can get twenty minutes on national TV and do whatever we want, we were getting away with murder. We thought it would last eight episodes. And we got an eight-episode order from MTV! That was all we thought we would do. We had no idea anyone would care; we were really just doing it because we thought it was funny. And then as soon as it came out, it just blew up. Knoxville was on the cover of Rolling Stone two months later and we got to make another fourteen episodes. We did the show for a year, twenty-two shows total, and then we canceled the show ourselves, which was unheard of.

Judd: For your own safety?

Spike: No, we did what we wanted to do. We also felt like MTV wasn't really promoting it that much because they were so nervous about it. They were really into it because it was so successful but they were also nervous about it and getting s.h.i.+t for it. And it just felt right to end it. We ended it on a high.

Judd: What was the criticism? That it was bad for our culture?

Spike: I mean, yeah. It was the downfall of Western civilization.

Judd: It wasn't just that it was something that kids have done forever.

Spike: Certain age groups would view it as nihilistic. So anyways, we ended up canceling it. But they didn't want us to cancel it, obviously. So we said, ”What if we do a movie as our last episode?” The movie was so fun and we had such a blast doing it.

Judd: What a great fraternity of people that is. The camaraderie of it.

Spike: We've been through life together. We've done so much together now. I've known Jeff for over thirty years. That's crazy. I've known Knoxville for twenty years, and a lot of the guys-we've been through it together. And we have a lot of it on tape, too.

Judd: It may be the funniest thing ever. I remember watching a little bit of it with my daughter-and she was too young to watch it. I was surprised at how dirty it is. But I couldn't resist showing it to her. I don't know if she was nine or ten at the time, but I'd fast-forward past anything bad. The next thing I know, someone's b.a.l.l.s are on the screen and she's laughing as hard as I've ever seen her laugh in my life. I mean it just brings such joy to people. When you watch it, you think: I never laugh this hard. Like, nothing can get me to this place of total hysteria where you fall to pieces laughing. That's a real gift to the world, and it cannot be underestimated.

Spike: We just stumbled on it. I don't think we had any idea.

Judd: It makes you feel like you're fifteen again. The friends.h.i.+p and craziness and that tension before they do crazy things-it's that nervous energy that really brings you back to middle school. In the best possible way.

Spike: That's what it's like when we're out there, feeling it. We are laughing. We are laughing more than anybody else. We just think it's the funniest thing in the world. You can't force that kind of chemistry, and we're very protective of that. We only do it if it feels right. It was fun to do the last one, Bad Grandpa.

Judd: I watched that with my eleven-year-old. I was like, My daughter can handle seeing b.a.l.l.s. When you're watching Bad Grandpa there's a moment where the big, long ball comes out and, as a parent, you think, Okay. It's probably going to go away in a second, so I'm not going to cover her eyes. And then you think, Wait, what's wrong with t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es? Is there anything wrong with seeing a t.e.s.t.i.c.l.e when you're a kid? And then you just say, f.u.c.k it, she's laughing too hard. This was one of the great father-daughter moments, watching this ridiculous movie. I mean, G.o.d, we laughed so hard. I took pictures of her laughing, it felt so momentous.

Spike: That's so sweet.

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