XL Cover Story: Austin Film Festival

Learning to laugh with Judd Apatow

Austin Film Festival » Harold Ramis: The evolution of funny » Buck Henry: comedy without     consequences » Learning to laugh with Judd Apatow » Austin Film Festival highlights

But the writer knows about commercial failure as well, having worked on some of the best canceled TV shows in recent years — including "Freaks and Geeks," a wonderful comedy/drama about high school that has found second life on DVD.

Apatow will revisit one of those "failures" this week, at an Austin Film Festival screening of "North Hollywood," a pilot that never became a TV series. He'll also be showing "Virgin" outtakes and answering questions from what is likely to be a legion of fans.

Is comedy culture something that's passed on directly from one generation to the next, like successive high school classes, or more a case where, say, you'd be as likely to draw on '30s films as on whatever was in theaters when you hit adolescence?

I think comedy people are influenced by everything that came before them. The first people I was interested in were the Marx Brothers, when I was in like third or fourth grade. I was pretty obsessed with the Marx Brothers, to the point where I wrote a 30-page report on them, and it wasn't even assigned to me at school. I just did it for my own amusement, in sixth grade.

I've been a real comedy nerd since I was 10 years old. I'm always searching for something inspiring, and sometimes you have to reach back to people who came before you and things you never bothered to see. I'd never studied the W.C. Fields movies until a couple of years ago — one day you're sitting watching a movie you've never seen before, and you go, "Wait a minute, this is the funniest movie ever made!"

Do you see any big differences between your generation and the one that came before?

There probably aren't that many differences, just because I'm so blatantly copying them! I always go back to "Stripes" (which Harold Ramis helped write) and how the first 15 minutes were constructed, as a way to figure out how I want to begin any movie I'm writing.

Buck Henry is somebody I've always been a big fan of. I always wonder why he's not hosting "Saturday Night Live" now. Because he was just the most hilarious host. I think we all go back to "The Graduate" as the perfect movie, in a way. I remember sitting in a hotel room with Owen Wilson — we were on the road writing a screenplay about 10 years ago. We sat and watched "The Graduate"; I had my computer in my lap and was just writing down what happened in every scene, trying to understand the construction! (Laughs.)

How does working so much in TV affect your approach to moviemaking?

When you work in TV, you have a production that's ongoing. So if you watch a cut of an episode and you think something doesn't work, you can go back while you're shooting the next week's episode to pick up a scene or a moment. So when I'm shooting a movie I'm usually trying to figure out what could go wrong, and then shooting some alternate piece of footage that might fix it. I always work from the place of, "if this was terrible, why would it be terrible?" In a way, I'm trying to do reshoots while we're shooting the movie. So at the end of "The 40 Year-Old Virgin," when he has to tell her he's a virgin, I literally got 20 different reaction lines from her, because I was really nervous. I mean, how would you react if your boyfriend says he's a virgin? So I just kept every possible option, and that's something I did a lot on TV. It mainly comes from the terror of failure.