Judd Apatow on the set of Knocked Up Suzanne Hanover/Courtesy of Universal Studios

Any plans to direct again any time soon?
I was about to start writing before the strike started, and then I realized that I was in a period of creative paralysis, and then the strike hit, and I blamed the creative paralysis on the strike. [laughs] So as soon as the strike ends, I'm going to try and write a movie to shoot in the fall of '08. I have an idea, so it's just brewing. I'm using the strike to brew it.

Are you done with Pineapple Express?
Pineapple Express is done, in the can. We're really excited about it. David Gordon Green, the director, did an incredible job. And James Franco is hysterical — those are not words anyone expected to hear, but I always knew he was funny, since Freaks and Geeks, and I always thought he was funny with Seth [Rogan] and they make a great comedy team and people are going to be really excited by that. There's a film we made on [the web site] Funny or Die about the strike that says without writers, we'll only have reality, and it's James Franco and Mila Kunis performing a scene from The Hills. And Franco's really funny. You could link to it! [Editor's Note: Sure.]

It's interesting that the internet is such a bone of contention in the writers' strike, but all the writers and actors are going there and just doing stuff for fun during the down time.
Yeah, absolutely. I think that's the mistake that the studios are making, they're only going to push everyone to figure out how to make money on the internet. Give me six months where I'm not working, and I will figure out how to make Funny or Die work better. I think it's very shortsighted. This sketch with James Franco — in two days, 400,000 people watched it. It's not that big a leap to us making a real movie and just putting it up on the internet and distributing it ourselves. I think there will be a moment when the artists say, "Why do we need these five studios? What exactly do they do?"

Getting back to Pineapple Express — the Superbad DVD has a clip from it, but it's tough to glean from it what the movie is about…
The original idea I had was, I was watching True Romance, and I thought Brad Pitt was so funny as the stoned guy and I thought, "I wish this movie just followed him out the door." And that was the first inspiration. So I thought, like, a weed action movie, like those pot movies with incredible, Jerry Bruckheimer–style action. And it's also — like all our movies — it's really about the friendship between Seth and his drug dealer James and them trying to figure out if they're actually friends or just in a business relationship. And it has a lot of action, and it gets very violent, and it's really, really funny.

Is it true you're approaching Huey Lewis to do a song for it?
Yeah, that's true. We have been talking to Huey Lewis about doing our closing title song — obviously we're all big fans, so that's just happening now. So we couldn't be more thrilled. He's totally game for it. I haven't met with him, Seth met with him, and they're working on it right now.

Is there a difference between working with guys like Seth and James, with whom you've worked a lot before, and guys like Robert Smigel and Adam Sandler who you worked with on the upcoming You Don't Mess With the Zohan?
Smigel is the best of everybody. Nobody is funnier than Smigel. It was a real pleasure to have had any involvement in Zohan, and that movie is riotously funny. It's very exciting to see a movie with Smigel's stamp on it like that. And it's a different world. It was really fun to try and come up with ways to make a funny movie with Adam, I worked on punch-ups on [the scripts for] Happy Gilmore and The Wedding Singer, but this was the first movie that I was a writer on [with Sandler] that has been produced. I haven't seen footage yet, but I'm very excited. It's a big action movie.