There aren’t very many artists who have made more people laugh in the last five years than Seth Rogen. Yet it’s striking how much the actor himself likes to laugh — and not just at his own jokes. This writer can, after some preliminary small talk, start out an interview with a second-rate joke and get a pleasingly long laugh from one of the most talented comedians in the country.
Rogen came to Washington last month to discuss his latest film, “50/50,” a comedy about cancer that opened this weekend. He was joined by his friend Will Reiser, who wrote the film loosely based on his own struggle with cancer. Rogen, then, is playing a version of himself. He’s the best friend of a young man diagnosed with a rare form of spinal cancer (played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and helps his pal make it through chemo, hair loss and intense pain the only way he knows how: by making him laugh.
“50/50” is a “cancer movie” like no other. Reiser wrote it that way.
“The genesis of the movie came when I was sick, and Seth was going through it [with] me. We would make jokes about the whole ordeal. That was our coping mechanism,” Reiser recalls. Some of his friends and family members couldn’t understand why he wasn’t constantly depressed.
“Their impression was based on what they’d seen in movies. And in every movie about cancer, it’s overdramatic, the person dies, everyone cries, it’s really depressing,” he says. “Those movies aren’t bad movies. That’s just not what it was like for us.”
Rogen notes that most movies are marketed these days as one-movie-meets-a-second-movie-meets-a-third. “We rarely reference other movies when we’re making a movie, because we’re generally making these movies because we see a void in cinema that we’re trying to fill,” he says.
Rogen isn’t even 30 yet, but the Canadian-born star who came of age doing stand-up as a teenager in Vancouver has already built a stunningly successful career. He’s also surrounded by a talented group of friends, including, besides Reiser and Goldberg, Judd Apatow, Hollywood’s reigning king of comedy and director of “Knocked Up.”
In fact, it seems just about all of the funniest people in Hollywood know each other and work with each other. Apatow produced “Pineapple Express,” which was directed by David Gordon Green, who has worked with Jody Hill, who wrote and directed Rogen in the underrated mall cop comedy “Observe and Report.” It seems unlikely so many genre-changing comedies would have come out of this group had they not collaborated, sharing ideas and stories and offering advice.
“Jody and Danny McBride and David Gordon Green have inspired me, honestly. When I saw ‘The Foot Fist Way’ for the first time, it seemed so different and yet so similar to what we were trying to do,” Rogen says. That mission is to make funny movies that have a sense of realism that had been missing from comedies for some time. Though he adds: “Their approach was so much crazier. I’ve think we’ve pushed our writing further after knowing those guys.”
In some ways, the Hill-McBride-Green school has a more determined sense of realism and boundary-pushing. Apatow’s films, as over-the-top as they can be, always lead to a heartwarmingly happy ending.
Rogen concedes the point. “Judd feels a moral obligation that those guys and I don’t necessarily feel in general. In ‘Pineapple Express,’ Judd and I actually got into a lot of discussions about how much weed there was in the movie and whether the characters should decide to stop smoking. If he was the writer of that movie, it would have ended much differently,” Rogen says.
