‘A WORLD WE ALL LIVE IN’
Apatow weaves funny into the drama with The King of Staten Island
From The 40-Year-old Virgin through Trainwreck, Judd Apatow has made funny movies. But he describes his newest, The King of Staten Island, as more of a drama with comedy in it.
“I was just trying to be disciplined about the level of authenticity,” says the 52-year-old from his home in Los Angeles, sporting a very bushy version of his trademark beard. “There are definitely movies where I’m trying to make everybody really funny almost all the time. And that’s not how people talk. It’s a heightened reality. And I felt like this movie required different rules. I wanted you to feel like this was a world we all live in.”
The King of Staten Island was co-written by Saturday Night Live’s Pete Davidson, who plays Scott, a fictionalized version of himself. Davidson was seven when his father, a firefighter, died in the 9/11 attacks; Scott’s late father was also a firefighter. Both Davidson and his character have mental health issues and Crohn’s disease. Both smoke a lot of weed.
Even so, Apatow cautions against reading too much into the movie. “Almost none of what happens in The King of Staten Island happened in real life, but that story does allow Pete to express a lot of his emotions about his life.”
Davidson, for instance, has no desire to become a tattoo artist like his character, and he is not the borderline criminal he plays in the movie. “But he did talk to me a lot about how insecure you feel when your father is a firefighter who died heroically, and on some level you always feel like you’ll never measure up.”
Apatow has long mixed fact and fiction in his comedies. “A lot of that came from working with Garry Shandling,” he says, referring to his work as a producer, writer and director on The Larry Sanders Show in the 1990s.
“That was always his approach. He played a character that was not too far from himself. And he liked all the actors and actresses who came on as guests of The Larry Sanders Show to be satirizing themselves. So I think I was trained in blurring that line.”
After Shandling died in 2016, Apatow put together a four-hour documentary about his late friend, The Zen Diaries of Garry Shandling. He also recently directed May It Last, about the North Carolina band the Avett Brothers.
“I always think about documentaries when making these movies,” he says of his fictional work. “I’m always attracted to the style of shooting that feels like a documentary. And I do think making docs has deepened my work. It got me more comfortable not needing laughs in moments that didn’t require them.”
An offhand remark about making a superhero movie had me wondering if that would ever be something he would seriously consider. Not right now, he says. He and wife Leslie Mann have two daughters, the youngest about to start Grade 12. (The other, 22-year-old Maude, plays Davidson’s sister in The King of Staten Island.)
“They require a lot more time than I want to give to a movie,” he says of the superhero genre. “I don’t want to do a six-month or eight-month shoot of anything because I’m trying to be home. I like to do movies that I can fit into the summer and that don’t require me to be in sessions looking at CGI effects for a long time. But when my kids are older I could see being more open to that type of experience, if there was an idea that I thought suited me.”
His first reaction to superhero movies is that there are others who could do them better. “But then I see the work of people like Jon Favreau ... he’s found a way to bring a lot of his humour and sense of style into that world. I think he changed superhero movies single-handedly by what he accomplished in Iron Man. So if I thought there was something I could bring to it, I would be open to any genre.”
Apatow’s casting choices are similarly open. He first worked with Marisa Tomei in Trainwreck, where she had a small role as “The Dog Owner” in a hilarious film within the film. She’s back as Davidson’s mom in The King of Staten Island. And Davidson himself has a blink-and-miss-it cameo in Trainwreck as a patient of Bill Hader’s character. That opened the door to Saturday Night Live.
“Sometimes people are just doing such strong work that you wonder what else you can do with them,” says Apatow. Take Ricky Velez, who plays one of Davidson’s friends in the new movie. “Ricky was so good that we set up a TV pilot with HBO and also a standup special.”
I mention Moises Arias, playing another friend. I first noticed him in the indie hit The Kings of Summer, from 2013. But Apatow ’s recollection goes back much further. “He used to be on the show Hannah Montana, and I’d watch it with my kids and say, ‘That kid who plays Rico is so funny!’ And when he came in to read for this I was so thrilled. I was like, Rico!”
The King of Staten Island is available on demand on June 12.