Funnyman Seth Rogen stars alongside Joseph Gordon-Levitt in 50/50, a dramatic comedy in which his character deals with his best friend’s cancer diagnosis.
Not the typical-sounding comedy, but we pretty much love everything Seth has ever been in: think Anchorman, Superbad, Knocked Up, The 40 Year Old Virgin and the list keeps going.
Seth is one of the faces of comedy for our generation, so when we heard about him starring in 50/50, we knew it would be a must-see, especially with that cutie Joseph Gordon-Levitt.
We caught up with Seth recently and chatted him up about his role in the new film. Check out our exclusive below!
GlobalGrind: This movie was percolating for a while in your real life experience. At what point did it all finally come together into a film?
Seth Rogen: It was a year and a half. After Will (Reiser, the film’s director) got better, he finally sent us a script or started writing a script around then. It was around two years after this all happened and the script was really good and it started getting attention. We started sending it out to actors and production companies and it wasn’t that hard to get it going, because we weren’t looking to do a huge version of it. We were always pretty modest in our production aspirations for the movie. So it came together pretty quickly after he finished the script.
Did you meet any resistance in the pitch until people read it on the page? Could people properly conceptualize the story or even wrap their heads around it?
A little bit, but we are used to that. Pretty much every one of our movies sounds really bad on paper and we’re used to having to back [it up]. Some people can pitch ideas and they have ideas that sound good as soon as you hear the one sentence version and you think, ‘That sounds great!’
None of our ideas are like that. All of our ideas, you need 120 pages of script to prove that they actually can be good movies and this was very much like that. So we knew and we tell our writers that. We always say, if you want money fast, then come up with a simple idea that is easy to pitch. If you want money in a long time, then write whatever the hell you want and write it well, because a good script will get made. We told Will [Reiser] to write a script because we knew no one would buy a pitch for a cancer comedy and once people read the script, they really liked it. It was really well executed and ultimately pretty well represented tonally of the movie. A lot of stuff changed, but it felt like the same movie.
You’re playing a character partially inspired by yourself. Was that weird or not weird?
It wasn’t that weird. We are used to, with a lot of our movies, really putting a lot of our personal experiences in. Even Knocked Up was my friends and a lot of that stuff was stuff we did. A lot of my movies probably have even more specific moments than this movie, of actual stuff that I have done in real life. It was more the writing that was surreal at times. To really have to talk about it with Will and other various people who were actually involved in what happened. To really analyze it and pull it apart and dissect it and really be hard on everyone. We got into it in ways that we never would have if we weren’t writing a movie about it.
Is there something when people leave the theater you’re hoping they take away, especially considering the subject matter of this film?
I just hope they like it, honestly. This movie, more then I expected, seems to be one that people are emotionally connecting to, which is very nice. But that’s not honestly always our goal. We really just want to make movies that are entertaining and it is really much more personal for us. We want to tell our story and we want to see what we went through represented in a movie, and if people connect to that and relate to it, then that’s very good. But it’s honestly not always our directive.
