VIEW FILM STILLS: Walk Hard

Judd Apatow, Jake Kasdan, and Kristen Wiig on the set of Walk Hard Gemma La Mana/Courtesy of Columbia Pictures

For a man whose career used to be defined by critically acclaimed and fan-adored TV series sent to early network graves, Apatow is now the king of comedy. Everything he touches — from 40-Year-Old Virgin to Talladega Nights to Knocked Up to Superbad — strikes gold, and now he's channeling his own personal musical interests into the story of Dewey Cox.

What inspired you to want to tackle the biopic, and was it hard to give Walk Hard any structure beyond joke-joke-joke?
These movies all have a structure, and you have no choice but to use it. It's like VH1 Behind the Music — it's always a rise-fall-rise structure, or a rise-fall-die structure. You can't avoid it. It was really [a question of] what details we wanted to have fun with. So me and Jake would sit on the phone for hours after my kids went to sleep and say things like, "We have to have a scene where they have sex, but it's clearly body doubles. Or we have to do a scene where he can't stop recording the same song like Brian Wilson because he's taken so much acid." And after a while we had to go through our list and decide which we actually wanted to include in the script.

Are there unique challenges to doing a comedy that's this broad as opposed to more reality-driven movies like Knocked Up?
The first job I had in the business was I created a TV show with Ben Stiller, The Ben Stiller Show, which was cinematic sketches — short films — and we parodied Bruce Springsteen and U2 and Metallica, so for me this was just a way to do that again, but with way more money. [laughs] We're very proud of the fact that this movie cost more than the movie we're making fun of. Because part of the joke is that the movie looks gorgeous. It looks like the Walk the Line people went home for the night, and we snuck on their set.

Was the size and scale ever daunting?
It was daunting, and you know how I dealt with it? I said, "Jake, you direct it." [laughs] "Tell me when you're in editing." Because really, the movie is so difficult to make, because even a real biopic doesn't cover this many decades. So we're covering from the '40s to the year 2000, so we had to do all those costumes and all those sets, but Jake really understands how to make a movie look beautiful. I don't. That's why I only produced.

Were there any specific musicians or biopics you couldn't work into this framework?
We didn't want to do the joke for joke parody. We were more parodying the fact that these movies reek of the fact that the makers of them think that they could win an Oscar. And that the actors are just chewing up the scenery like, "This is my Oscar performance!" But we watched all of them, and all of them are very similar, because they deal with the big problem, which is time compression. How do you show a 70 or 50 year life in two hours? And the only way you can do it is by having every person who walks into every scene be vital to the story, and that makes these movies all kind of the same. Someone walks in the room, and it's a woman, he's going to have sex with her or marry her or both. [laughs] So that was the thing that made us laugh the most. But there'd be little details in movies that would crack us up, like in this Jerry Lee Lewis movie, he's a kid and he sneaks a peek inside of this juke joint and there's all these African-American people dancing in a manner that's way too choreographed and erotic. We said, "We've gotta do that — make a way-too-erotic sequence at the blue's club."