Drake Bell in Superhero Movie Courtesy of The Weinstein Company

So, I have to ask if Tracy Morgan was anything like Tracy Jordan [his character from 30 Rock] on set?
Oh, nothing like that character. No, he's so convincing as that character that I have to admit I was a little worried at first. But he's the most gentlemanly, hard-working professional guy I think I've worked with in a long time. The contrast between who he is and who he plays on TV is startling. I was as surprised as you are now. But he's a great guy.

How long has this film been in gestation? And why has it taken so long for Hollywood to realize that superheroes are big business and a spoof should have perhaps already been made for this generation of young filmgoers?
You know, I'm not sure. Certainly for me, I started thinking about this, oh boy, this was already still back when we were working on Scary Movie 3 together with David Zucker. So we've been thinking about this for five years. It was just about finding the right time to do it. I don't think Hollywood gets the value of superhero movies. It's hard making spoof films, and I think that there's been a sort of a strange evolution in the genre where for some filmmakers spoof is just about making fun of whatever happened in the last year, and that's not really what we do. We're more oriented toward a genre or a specific film and so I'm happy that nobody else did it before we did.

How does your writing process work on a script like this? Do you watch the movies that are being parodied to find moments in them which tickle your fancy? Or do you zero in on touchstones in popular culture that are worth including, and then work them into your plotline? Or does the comedy flow from the original storyline?
In the case of this movie, and I think the Scary Movies that we did, we do like to center on one movie or two movies as the spine of the film and we derive our characters to a large extent from their characters and we derive our plotline to a large extent from their plotline. But where this movie was different is that we wanted to be a little more original and separate from the other films. There are some moments that are direct spoofs of Spider-Man but not many. It's more that we are following the very tried and true storyline that many superhero movies have. And then we created our own villain [with] a unique plotline, and our hero has a unique plot line. So, in this sense I think it was written more like in the vein of Naked Gun, which is to say, you're spoofing a genre of movie but you're doing it with your own original characters and story.