Catching Up With... Jake Kasdan and John C. Reilly

Jake Kasdan
Interview by Jesse Jarnow

Taking a break from their tender post-Farrelly brothers comedies, the members of the Apatow Cartel aim even broader with Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story. John C. Reilly stars as the parodying, pun-inducing Cox, who traipses from cliché to cliché, with an occasional bout of full-frontal dudeage. With a soundtrack of trope-perfect homages that range from Bob Dylan to Brian Wilson, the film itself plays for slapstick.

Helming is Jake Kasdan, who co-wrote the film with Judd Apatow, whom he worked with on the short-lived (and much beloved) series Freaks & Geeks. Although he's the son of screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan (Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Big Chill) and director of the paranoid comedy Zero Effect (1998), his latest owes more to Airplane and the late night conversations of two thirtysomething music dorks.

Paste: I hear you wrote the film on the phone.
Jake Kasdan: We did, we did. It probably just arose out of the fact that we're both busy doing other things during the day, and we're both kind of night owls who talk on the phone late at night anyway, so it was partly just our natural rhythm. Also, we are lazy and live way across town from each other. We started bouncing ideas back and forth and making notes about various kinds of joke sequences. We started that way for a couple of months, cataloguing jokes and ideas, and eventually sat down and figured out an outline that would contain a lot of them. Then we tried out different parts and passed it back and forth for rewrites.

Paste: How tight was the script? Was there a lot of improv?
Kasdan: The stylistic demands of the piece, just the fact that everybody talks in that weird biopic-y talk, limited it a touch. And also the fact that we were within a fairly rigid structure—dovetailing in and out of songs in so many scenes, and so much of it is musical, or a montage, or intended to be a montage—necessitated that it wasn't constant improv, exactly, but there was consistently a good deal of it. Whenever the scene lends itself to it, there's a lot of it. We tried to do as much as we could.

Paste: How did you start working with Judd Apatow?
Kasdan: We had met socially before Freaks & Geeks. I was a huge fan of his from The Ben Stiller Show, which I loved, which is how I became acquainted with Ben, who was the star of my first movie, Zero Effect. I knew Judd a little that way, but we didn't know each other really well. Then he called me out of the blue and asked me to do the Freaks pilot. The story he always tells is that, when he called, he'd never actually seen my movie. He knew nothing about my work. It was a recommendation from someone that seemed like an instinct that he should follow. Then he saw my movie and realized it had nothing to do with Freaks & Geeks. No relationship at all. It's been a big, major connection. We've continued to work together, and we've become very close in the process of that. For whatever reason, we really got along well and complemented each other well. His process is so different from mine, and from the process that I'd grown up around. He comes from a real comedy background, very clearly: working for stand-ups at joke-writing. He thinks primarily in terms of jokes and everything else follows, and that's not how I really think about writing. And I come from more story, character. So that was a cool thing. He hadn't really directed at that time. I think I demystified that for him a little bit.

Paste: Was there a breaking point in seeing other biopics that made you want to make this?
Kasdan: It was more cumulative. There'd been so many in such a short time. Not just music biopics, but someone's-entire-life kind of movies. For a few years there, it seemed like every November/December, there'd be five of them. And they were always packaged the same way: a very important story of a significant person whose story tells us something about ourselves and America. Like, "Once in a lifetime, there is a story..." Always with a central performance that is legitimately brilliant. That thing, of playing the entire human experience, it just started to seem that we were seeing a lot of it. By the nature of the problems you get while doing that, we'd get a lot...everybody's extraordinary life started to seem sort of similar.

Paste: What was it like having Jack White play Elvis?
Kasdan: The world's funniest, strangest Elvis imitation. An impressionistic Elvis impression. He was in the movie 'cause John called him and said, "Do you wanna do this?" We knew we wanted to get some actual rock stars in the movie, and that one needed to be funny. We sort of suspected that Jack White had a real sense of humor, and indeed he's hilarious. He showed up and was improvising for hours, no problem. That was very impressive. He was going hours and takes and takes and hitting all kinds of insane veins and just riffing for hours with John. He was pretty unbelievable. There are 20 ways that scene could've played out. We went with something that made us laugh. There's a longer version on the DVD. With that scene, we came up with the funny idea that maybe he should just be speaking in an incomprehensible gibberish. And as soon as someone threw that out there, it became obvious that he could do it for hours and not sound like he was repeating himself.

Paste: In Knocked Up, there's a crowning shot. Here, there is male full-frontal. What can possibly come next?
Kasdan: Believe me, Judd is actually sitting somewhere right now trying to figure out what you show after a penis. You should call him and ask him; I'm sure he has some thoughts of that. In Forgetting Sarah Marshall [coming 5/08], which is one of our other movies, which our friend Jason Segel from Freaks wrote and stars in, you actually get Jason's penis, so I guess the lead actor's penis is the next frontier. I don't know what follows after that.

Continue to the next page to read Paste's conversation with John C. Reilly