Empire: What are your favorite comedy movies?
Leslie: Harold and Maude.
Judd: I thought you hated that. I’m joking! Come on, our daughter’s named Maude. So we’re in tune there.
Leslie: Are we in tune or out of tune? You keep changing your tune.
Judd: I’m trying to make this interesting! I’m shaking it up.
Leslie: Shake it up by leaving.
Judd: What are your favorites?
Leslie: I have three: Harold and Maude, Broadcast News, Terms of Endearment.
Judd: Okay, we’re in tune.
Empire: Paul Feig, co-producer on Freaks and Geeks, described you as “a shouter,” Judd. When did that change?
Leslie: Right after that. It was his back.
Judd: I herniated my disk right after Freaks and Geeks, due to bad posture, a car accident, and general stress. Then when Undeclared went down, I was fighting the studio because they wouldn’t let me direct a pilot I wrote….But I realized I was treating this executive like my mother and the other person who wouldn’t let me do it like my father, and I was projecting all my issues onto them. As soon as I made that connection, everything changed.
Empire: You had rave reviews for Freaks and Geeks and Undeclared but terrible ratings. How do you deal with the knowledge that you’re making something good that nobody wants to watch?
Judd: It felt so bad. I had a rebellious streak that it was better to be a cool, indie geek than a mainstream rock star. The Ben Stiller Show was canceled after twelve episodes. Cable Guy didn’t do well. I was doing punch-ups on some movies that were successful, working uncredited on a lot of things that were doing well. I knew what it took, but I didn’t necessarily want to do it in my own work. I got really depressed and kept switching back and forth between [TV and movies] when I wasn’t succeeding commercially in either. At the end of Undeclared, I asked Will Ferrell to play a meth addict who will write your term paper for money. He hadn’t had a big movie yet, just some supporting parts. I thought, This guy should be a movie star but I can’t get a movie made with him, so let’s just put him in an episode. He had a good time, so he brought us Anchorman, which he wrote with Adam McKay.
Empire: Leslie, what was your point of view, watching your husband go through that?
Leslie: It was awful. He was really stressed out and that put a lot of pressure on me. We had a new baby. He was such a nightmare. Just kind of on another planet, stressed-out and unavailable. Obsessing about work…But he’s kind of still like that. I’m really tired of it.
Judd: I could talk for hours about her being miserable about work.
Leslie: Do you know what I did? When his back went out, I went to New York and did this little film with Jeff Goldblum and I had my first love scene with him. So I was really enjoying myself and I felt terrible about it. Judd was literally being operated on—
Judd: On my spine.
Leslie: And I was in bed with Jeff Goldblum! And Jeff is very Method and he wants to rehearse—
Judd: But this as a business can just consume everything. When you have a family, you’re worried. And for Leslie, you’re always auditioning and waiting to see if people like you. Eventually we thought, We should just create our own work.
Empire: So tell us about The 40-Year-Old Virgin and finally getting that success.
Judd: We got shut down after two days. They thought Steve Carell looked like a serial killer.
Leslie: They thought Paul Rudd was fat.
Judd: They thought I was lighting it like an indie. They literally shut it down in the middle of the day. They didn’t even wait….I decided not to yell. That was a turning point. I decided just to listen and not react at all. I didn’t tell them it was insane to shut down a production and cost themselves half a million dollars when they could just call me at night and discuss it. Because I didn’t yell, it resolved itself much quicker.
Empire: How did it resolve?
Judd: We started up again two days later. It was really silly.
Leslie: You made some adjustments. Paul went on a diet. He literally stopped eating. What did you change with Steve?
Judd: Nothing. Steve decided the character would be a little more Buster Keaton–esque. He was low-energy and everyone else was spinning around him. Everything we shot in those first two days became some of the funniest stuff in the movie. It was the speed-dating sequence. So there was no purpose to it.
Leslie: If you look at Paul Rudd in the speed-dating sequence compared to the rest, he’s, like, ten pounds heavier. Then in the rest of the movie his hair looks cute and he’s thinner.
Empire: Then Knocked Up happened….
Leslie: Knocked Up is the story of when our daughter Iris was born.
Judd: Almost beat for beat. From the doctor not showing up to getting the doctor you rejected earlier and asking him to deliver the baby and him being mean to you. We knew it was a crazy story. The last third is almost exactly what happened. Leslie goes into labor and I call my doctor but he’s out of town.
Leslie: But we saw him about three hours before that and my water broke. He said, “No, your water didn’t break, you can go home.” He wanted to leave town and go to a bar mitzvah in San Francisco. So I think he lied to me and said my water didn’t break, which is really dangerous. But he’s such a stupid fucking asshole and I hate him. So we wound up with this guy who had giant hands, like Shrek. And there were complications and he was mad at us and he reeked of cigarettes and it was just horrible. But it made a good movie.
Empire: When did you both first realize that you could make people laugh?
Leslie: I would audition for dramatic parts and people would laugh at me—not ideal at the time—so slowly I realized the comedy world is where I belonged.
Judd: I wanted to be funny more than I was. I realized, when I worked with people, that I could write in their voices. So I could write jokes for Roseanne or Larry Sanders, but I didn’t have my own voice.
Empire: You started as a stand-up. Was your intention to become a performer or writer?
Judd: I probably thought I could become Eddie Murphy….But I didn’t do any of the acting side because I was confident that I was terrible. Even when I did stand-up, I was smart enough to know that I had no life experience or real opinions. So it was more fun for me to write for people who had really strong opinions, because I didn’t care about anything but being a comedian.
Empire: Was the decision to move to writing a conscious one or driven by circumstance?
Leslie: It was a decision made by Jim Henson.
Judd: I auditioned for him for this reality show where he gave cameras to a couple of comedians who traveled round the country. I auditioned with Adam Sandler and David Spade and Rob Schneider. Jim Henson said he wanted to buy all my ideas but didn’t want to cast me because I lacked warmth.
Leslie: From the guy who created the Muppets.
Judd: From the guy who taught you how to read. It hit me hard….But the fact he wanted my ideas was important. I realized Adam Sandler was really fun to watch and be around and I knew I wasn’t like him. I was just a normal guy with some good lines.