Empire: You’ve now worked together many times, but This Is 40 was the first time Leslie was the lead. How was that different?
Leslie: It was just more tiring, but he protected me from all the stresses from the outside world. I don’t know what the budget is or what the politics were. It was just a safe world for all the actors. I was so grateful for that. Thank you, honey. I kind of like you a little bit more again.
Judd: See, we’ve gone full circle. She hated me and then she likes me again. This is my day. This is my life.
This interview was conducted by Olly Richards and originally appeared in the March 2013 edition of Empire magazine.
LOUIS C.K. (2014)
Louis C.K. is one of those people who are so brilliant and funny and uncompromising that sometimes I need to avoid their work. When I was writing This Is 40, I made a point to never watch his TV show because I was aware that it was, on one level, about a middle-aged guy with two daughters, and if I watched it, and loved it, I would probably feel like there was no need for me to make my movie. (Only after I locked my film did I go and binge-watch it. I couldn’t love it more.) I also make a point of not watching too much of his stand-up, because he’s so prolific and covers so much ground. Watching him makes me feel like there’s nothing left to talk about, and that everything has already been done, as well as it can be done, by Louis. He has raised the bar for all of us.
It is worth noting that we conducted this interview in Louis’s kitchen in New York City and, as we spoke, he made me a delicious dinner of steak and beans. For a moment, I felt like I was one of his kids, and I came away thinking, They have a pretty good situation there.
Judd Apatow: I was reading an article about you recently and I saw that you had an experience a little like mine—as a kid, I worked at a radio station, and you, somebody got you a job at a TV station?
Louis C.K.: Yeah.
Judd: I had a guy like that, too. He ran the high school radio station and treated us like adults. He was the cool guy. He would curse and he went to NYU with Martin Scorsese and taught film at the high school and he made me think that you could do anything, even as a little kid. So I had a radio show and interviewed all these comics. And I’m wondering what that was like for you to have this teacher who said, I’m going to hook this kid up.
Louis: In junior high school, I did nothing but drugs. I got in trouble all the time. I was a messed-up kid. And then in my first year of high school, I stopped all that and became a good student, but the problem was, by then, all my friends from junior high school had dropped out—like, every one of them. Five of my friends dropped out of high school after one year. And there was this kid Neil who lived a block from the high school and everybody would be there, at his house, partying every day—from nine in the morning, when his parents left for work.
Judd: Where did Neil’s parents think the kids were?
Louis: They couldn’t control it. Both parents worked. I mean, everybody I knew was getting high and nobody could do anything about it.
Judd: Did they assume the kids were going to get jobs when they were that young?
Louis: Everybody had jobs. I had a job. Sophomore year of high school, I worked at Kentucky Fried Chicken. Everybody worked at fast-food places. So all these kids were told by their parents—the parents got together and said, Just get out of school and work. The idea was that they were all going to come back to school a year later and try again. Anyway, all of a sudden all of my friends were getting high every day and I couldn’t resist, so I just stopped going to school.
Judd: What grade is that? Tenth?
Louis: Tenth grade. And before that, I was a great student. I was getting A’s. So there’s this meeting with all my teachers and my mom came and they told her: “Your son’s not coming to school.” And my mom, who thought we were out of the woods, was like, “God damn it.” It was a great meeting because I felt like I was able to be honest with it all. My mom and I had been through a lot together, and I said, “I’m having a hard time staying here. I get depressed in school and it’s hard.” And one of my teachers—he was my homeroom teacher—he just said, “Well, you can’t do nothing.” He said, “You don’t have to go to school if it’s not for you, but you can’t do nothing. What do you want to do?” And I said, “Well, geez. I’d like to make TV shows and movies.” And he said, “If I can get you a job in that area, will you do that?” I said sure. And he came up to me the next day with a card and he said, “This is the number for Continental Cablevision, the local cable company.” They had a TV station. He said they hire interns and it doesn’t pay anything but you can go there and you can learn about television. And so I went to this place and there were these people making television and it was pretty good equipment and they had a news show and sports and little art shows and stuff. So they explained, If you come here, we’ll teach you how to use all this equipment and you can do whatever you want. And I couldn’t fucking believe it. I stopped going to Neil’s house immediately and I thought, I want to get back into school. I had a direction in my life. So I started going to the station and it was all grown-up people. I was the only kid there.
Judd: Would you edit? Did you work the cameras?
Louis: I just started doing everything. I sucked in the learning. I would sit and watch the news editor. I learned how editing worked, and I was very good with machines. I could fix cameras when they broke and stuff. So I became the kid everybody trusted. They let me take the equipment home. If you could fix it, nobody cared. So I became a pet there, and everyone treated me like a grown-up.
Judd: I did the same thing at Comic Relief. When I was in college, I saw on TV that they were planning to do Live Aid but with comedians. It was called Comic Relief. I called up and said, “I will do anything.” I was eighteen. “I’ll do anything, just let me help.” They said, “Well, we don’t have anything,” but then three months later they called back and said, “Come in and help us.” I started putting on benefits around the country at all the clubs. But it was the same attitude: I am going to be your go-to guy. And that’s what you want your kids to have. It’s hard, I think. I talk about this all the time with my kids. The reason why you do that is because you can see your demise if you don’t do it. Our kids, though—they don’t have that fire on their ass because when I was a kid both my parents went bankrupt. It was very chaotic for a while and so, when those opportunities came up, I was an animal because I was afraid that I would be homeless at some point. I used to think that all the time. Jim Carrey always used to say that when he saw homeless people he would have this image of the guy patting the ground going, “Here, this spot’s for you”—and that’s what drove him. And he was homeless as a kid. His dad was an accountant who lost his job and never got an accounting job ever again and they became janitors at a factory. The whole family had dropped out of school. They would all clean together.
Louis: Wow, yeah, I don’t know. Who knows what’s in store for our kids. It might not stay like this forever. I always say that to my kids. I probably lay it on them a little too much. Someday they might be saying to their friends, “My dad used to have a house on Shelter Island, and he had a boat.” I mean, for Jim Carrey’s climb and everything that happened for him—the massive success—he’s looking for work. You always end up looking for work.