"Hello, my name is Judd Apatow the producer and cowriter of Walk Hard." "I'm Jake Kasdan, I'm the director cowriter and co-producer of Walk Hard." "I'm John C. Reilly, and I play Dewey Cox in Walk Hard." "I am Lew Morton, executive producer." "That means Lew Morton added more sweet funny if you're wondering what Lew did." "That's right." "It also means that we're all working on the same movie which is good news." "We're all from Walk Hard." "So this is the long cut and the short cut." "We're doing the same commentary at the same time." "I guess I'll cut out the commentary from the long cut to make the short cut." "So any enormous leaps of logic will be explained by that edit." "That's right." "And we advise listening to both." "Ultimately, it's better to listen to the commentary twice." "And the extended commentary will give you even more comments." "Sorry to interrupt, guys." "Out of the gate, we've just had our first dick joke." "We're about five seconds into the movie." "We're about to redo that dick joke 1 1 times in the next 1 4 seconds." "That's right." "So let's start from the beginning." "Jake called me one night and said, "l have this great idea for a movie and I never come up with big comedy ideas." "Shouldn't we spoof these music biopics?"" "And I said, "Yeah, let's do it."" "And then Jake wasn't so sure whether or not he really wanted to do it, so I had to push him." "Like, actually do it?" "Jake didn't like the idea of" "When you say let's do it, you mean, like, "Tomorrow we start doing that"?" "Then I called Jake a few days later and I said:" ""Jake, you just have to ask yourself one question:" "Do you wanna own a house?"" "I just think that story paints me in a curious light, told that way." "And I don't think that's why Jake did it but it really says more about my manipulative ways as a producer." "Well, what's extraordinary about your manipulative ways as a producer and it's not the first time that I've-- I call it the Apatow mind trick." "It's a series of three short phone calls where in by the end of them you've made a decision that's gonna influence years of your life." "It's the same way we started working together on Freaks and Geeks which is Judd called and said, "You know, I'm doing this pilot." "You wanna come direct it?" "It shouldn't be that big a deal." "It'll take a couple of weeks." "You should probably just do it."" "And by the end of the phone call, you're" "Sort of realize that you've agreed to do it and you're pumped and it does change the course of your life." "Likewise, in those first couple of conversations next thing I knew I was" " We were-- It was, you know, happening." "Within weeks, we were writing this thing." "About two days after that phone call I got a call from Judd and he told me:" ""l think I tricked Jake into doing Walk Hard. "" "What's extraordinary, it only speaks to my usual reticence in making big decisions." "Judd manages to bypass and short-circuit that thing." "He usually keeps it very casual with the actors." "When he called me, he was, like" "You know, he calls on some other context." "You know, like to talk about Talladega Nights DVD or something." "And I was like, "Oh, hey, hey--" Right at the end of the conversation:" ""l was just taking to Jake Kasdan." "We were really laughing about this funny idea for a biopic and we were thinking you would be funny to do that." "But you probably don't wanna do that." "Anyway, I'll talk to you later, man." "We'll talk next week or something."" "You hang up, "What?" "Who were they laughing at?"" "What are you doing in 2006 and 2007?" "Dewey just cut his brother in half." "There was a debate about:" "How can you kill a child and have an audience enjoy it?" "There was talk of filming of him falling off a roof." "And then we ultimately realized we shouldn't make it softer." "We should go 1 0 times nastier with it." "And then if he con-- If he continues to talk then maybe it's okay because he got cut in half real bad here." "We'd been talking about the possibility that he" "This is such a weird idea." "We'd been talking about the possibility that the brother falls off the roof in the barn that the brother falls off the roof in the barn and breaks his-- The sockets of his shoulders and loses the ability to use his shoulders." "You remember that Judd?" "We thought that" "That was his" " His brother's big injury is that, because he's a piano player his arms just hang all day long." "One of us has a BlackBerry that is interfering with the" "Yeah, that's what I was about to say." "Mine is not in the room." "Oh, it's Jake Kasdan." "No, no." "It's Lew, it's Lew." "It's off." "It's off." "I'm innocent." "I don't know." "Something's going down in this room." "Maybe I have some other transmitting device." "Then I remember I called" "Maybe by my pacemaker." "And then, I remember I called Judd up one night and I said:" ""You know, if he didn't fall off the roof and instead, it was like they were playing a game and he got cut in half."" "And Judd said, "Well, that's the other way to go." "He gets cut in half with a machete on the third page." "That's the other thing we could do."" "And he says it as though that's like-- There's a book somewhere and one of the options is cut in half with a machete on the third page." "There's a Syd Field book." "We should go that way." "It'll pass, Dewey." "Now, John, when you first heard this idea I know that you were concerned." "And for a while, you were pitching that you were" "It was like a Everly Brothers-type, a duo." "Yeah, well, that was sort of the Sophie's Choice for me was I had some designs on an actual biopic which I was gonna do in a really cool way that was not like regular biopics." "It was all gonna be inside his mind." "Yeah, and I had been looking for years." "The brother wasn't gonna get killed till page 1 0." "You know, I was gonna do it, like, in snatches and not make it linear and just, you know" "Like the Dylan one." "Yeah, well, I guess." "Not really, I haven't seen that one, but" "Anyway, yeah, I wanted to do, like, a story about two brothers that sang together, and that's how I met Jack White." "Really?" "Yeah." "Because I had this idea and I was searching for someone to play the brother who could sing with me, who could sing harmony." "And then I thought, "He wants to get into acting" from that part in Cold Mountain." "And Renée Zellweger, my friend, knows him." "I got his number and called him." "And that's when my first conversations started with Jack." "And what is his number?" "In Detroit, it's 6" " No." "And can we be his friend?" "So when you called him for a movie, it was kind of like" "We talked a couple of times already about working together maybe and then I'd gone to some of their shows." "And, yeah, so the well was primed." "Now, here's one thing about this scene that's interesting which is this bluesman is the legendary Honeyboy Edwards." "And he's been doing this for quite some time." "He's written a lot of amazing songs." "He was personal friends with Robert Johnson who died in 1 934- "We were old friends."" "Which gives you a sense that" "And Honeyboy is actually one of the experts on Robert Johnson and I believe he is now in his" "He's about 94 years old which we should all, you know, aspire to be." "He was actually gonna do this commentary." "He's driving here, but very slowly." "But this" " Filming this scene, I will say was one of the really fascinating, surreal filming experiences I've ever had because everybody involved" "Well, particularly Conner, who plays young Dewey and he is very talented and very funny." "And Honeyboy, you know, there" "One, very young and one's been doing this a while but not doing exactly this." "It was like a great sort of surreal Walk Hard moment making this scene." "It was a scene where the two main actors in the scene their average age is 50." "That's right." "Jake, you said we should all aspire to be 94 years old." "Jake, you said we should all aspire to be 94 years old." "I say fuck that." "I wanna aspire to be 1 5 years old." "That's true too." "I'm gonna see" "And here comes a scene where I get to play 1 5 years old." "Or 1 4 actually, in this one." "It's a lot of action back there, kids juggling." "That's the world of a talent show." "The rest of the talent show." "That's always the big issue with a movie like this is:" "How young will the lead actor think he can play?" "We always thought it was really funny that the sort of fictional" "That the attitude of the filmmakers, of us was that it's the most important movie ever made and that the performance is the most important performance of all time." "And, therefore, it should start at the youngest possible parameter beyond what seems even possible, really which would be that John would play the part from 1 4 to 80." "I think Sissy Spacek pulled off 1 3 in Coal Miner's Daughter." "Yeah, it's a great convention of the biopic." "There was a moment" " I was talking about this the other night." "when we momentarily considered replacing a child's head with John's head." "And having him play it even from 6 years old." "I made a hard play for that one, I remember." "I thought that was a great idea." "It was too expensive to do, though." "And really, it would've been just the weirdest thing of all time." "I think they did that in Fred Claus." "That's right." "John Michael Higgins was an elf and they put his head on an actual little person." "Here's a little bit of extension that's happening." "Actually, juggling." "See?" "Someone's BlackBerry." "See, someone's getting a signal." "Swear to God, it's not me." "I think it's someone in the other room." "This girl was the sweetest." "She was actually a really great little tap dancer." "And she was nervous." "Jake made her tap, like, a seven-minute routine to get that six seconds." "To find the best six seconds." "I wanted something to pick from." "This is always a mystery joke, that Matt Price gets a big laugh on the "ladies and germs," that I know" "It's a mystery joke." "It's pure charisma." "It is pure Matt Price charisma." "It's pure comic charisma." "When we started this, Jake and I did a little film festival where we watched all of these movies:" "Great Balls of Fire, The Buddy Holly Story." "We even watched the Marilyn Monroe movie where Norma Jean is played by one woman and then Marilyn was played by another." "Mira Sorvino and Ashley Judd each playing different aspects of Marilyn Monroe." "Fighting in conflict and fighting with each other in every scene." "And a lot of what's in the movie came from that initial film festival." "The one that made me laugh most was erotic dancing in the African-American night club." "That really made us laugh in Great Balls of Fire that there was" "How the movie opens which is, that's what's happening on the wrong side of the tracks." "It starts with the kids walking across train tracks." "And you see, they look in a barn window and that's what's going on." "I haven't heard a word you're saying." "I'm transfixed by this performance." "I understand." "This musical performance." "There really is no comment I can make here." "This is the first" " No, it's not." "Yeah, there is no comment to make." "It's the first nothing." "It's the only time." "We all" " We have our first vomit." "Yeah, exactly, that's our first puke." "There's Kristen Wiig, for the first time in the movie." "Getting pointed at." "Now, who wrote this particular song?" "The song was written by Antonio Ortiz who is a guy that I am friendly with and a really good song writer." "And he just nailed the innocuous pop song." "That was one of our first song concepts was the super-innocuous Buddy Holly-esque early rock song that starts a riot." "And he really nailed it." "And that's Rance Howard, Ron Howard's dad, as the priest." "That's right." "He also, I believe, was a priest in Anchorman." "We cut that scene out but it's on the DVD." "You definitely got the sense talking to him that that's one of his things that he specializes in and, in fact, has the robes." "I have now worked with both of Ron Howard's parents." "Really?" "I worked with his father in this movie." "And in a short film for cable that Tom Cruise directed I worked with his mother." "Really?" "Yeah." "Which of Ron Howard's parents is better?" "Don't put John in that position." "Don't put John in that position." "And, Jake, talk about who plays Pa here." "Well, this is Ray Barry who is a brilliant character actor and thespian and stage actor and actor who's just done a ton of great work." "Always in real movies." "This was his indoctrination into fake movies." "And it was really fun to cross that threshold with him." "He's just like" "He's just this incredibly imposing, brilliant guy and also the sweetest guy on earth." "And the ladies love Ray Barry, it turns out." "And for a day, we thought he was the ex-professional football player." "There was rumor going around that he was the hall of famer, Ray Barry." "There was that." "He's got the" "And he's not." "He's got the physique that you could be confused about." "He's this, like, towering figure of a man and really funny." "...and really funny." "Speaking of erotic dancing we're about to get some very hyped-up African-American people on the dance floor." "Now, Judd, tell us a little bit about this song." "Now, my grandfather produced this song back in the '50s or '60s." "Not a bit." ""Jump Little Children."" "And Bobby Shad, the singer is named after my grandfather, Bobby Shad who produced the first Janis Joplin record." "Again, all of this is not a bit." "Not a bit." "All true, all true." "This is an extension of this performance where we've got this shot that was" "This is one of the only things that was painful for me to cut out of the theatrical version, was all this stuff." "Some of it's in the movie, but we extended the song." "I love this song." "It's worth the-- At this moment early on acknowledging Mike Andrews who produced all of this music and laid down this track with a bunch of his team of crazies." "And it's the first time the movie actually rocks, I always think." "It's the first shot at actual foot tapping." "Because you're probably not gonna tap your foot during "Take My Hand."" "It's distracting." "It doesn't-- It's not a sensation of rocking whereas "Jump" is the first time doing moves of the big city and it gets exciting." "And Anne Fletcher choreographed that sequence." "Yeah, that's right." "Yes." "And she did the dance at the end of 40 Year Old Virgin..." "...and just directed 27 Dresses." "She also was a featured dancer in Boogie Nights and was the co-choreographer on Boogie Nights." "She was also the choreographer on Orange County." "We all love Anne Fletcher." "Now, this actor really made us laugh." "Yes, Paul." "He's great." "Yes, Paul." "He's great." "This is based on the Ginnifer Goodwin character in Walk the Line, the not-supportive wife." "Although, it's a character that occurs in basically every" "It's in the Robert Johnson story as well." "There's always a" "The Al Jolson Story." "And the sort of math of it, we figured out is in order for a hero to be incredibly sympathetic and still heroic when he leaves his wife for another woman midway through the movie, you need the first wife to be awful to him throughout the whole first half of the movie and kind of yelling at him all the time and clearly not believing." "So she's always saying, you know he's gonna fail, even when he's a great success." "I wish we kept this joke in, the slaughterhouse flashback." "Yeah." "I don't think I've ever seen it." "I always pitched Jake the idea of a cow just screaming right into the camera." "But...." "John, how did you go about--?" "How do you prepare to play Dewey Cox?" "Oh, God, I've answered that question so many times in the junket this weekend already but" "This time, you can tell the truth." "By the time anyone's hearing this, they're already so committed." "I prepare by reading my sides in the trailer that morning like all actors do." "No, I've watched a lot of documentaries and making the music was really the big preparation for this character." "Eight months of recording." "John tracked 40 original songs with him singing over the course of about eight months with Mike producing all that stuff." "And Manish Raval and Tom Wolfe the music supervisors who were coordinating it and all these great song writers." "It's hard." "This is actually one of the first scenes that we wrote for the movie." "The "long, hard walk."" "Speech." "This is early on in the filming too." "This is one of the first things we did." "I remember when Kristen came in I thought like, "All right, this movie's gonna be all right if we can get people that can improvise as well as she can." "Yeah, this was the fourth day." "And it was one of the original ideas, which is that he gives the speech where you can hear the title of the movie trying to jump out of the speech, but the character can't do it." "That was one of my dreams as an actor to be able to say the title of the movie." "It was" " It is one thing that I've got to say and no one ever believes me, but I'm a big Walk the Line fan." "But they do have-- It is the great moment when Reese Witherspoon walks out of the theater and says:" ""You can't walk the line."" "It's the appearance of song titles in dialogue that inspires song titles in the movie." "You have said titles before in movies, John." "I remember I saw you in that one movie, you said:" ""What's eating Gilbert Grape?"" "There's that other movie where you said, "This night's really boogying."" ""Excuse me, Dolores Claiborne."" ""Look, he's not just Howard Hughes." "He's the aviator."" ""The businessman?" "No, the aviator."" ""l really feel like a casualty of this particular war."" "Yeah, that's right." "Now this" " The Jewish record-company executives...." "Yeah, no one's been mentioning this, but we made a" "Strong choice." "We made a big, strong choice here that I fought from the very beginning and then came to love." "Yeah, it's an interesting one." "You came to love it because it's Harold Ramis and Phil Rosenthal and Martin Starr playing our Jews, who are just so funny." "But" "It is a funny thing where you show this movie to an audience and there's, like, a real reaction to just the appearance of Hasidic guys." "Like, it's a laugh, but it's also like it's applause." "Like, there's real Hasidim appreciation out there, it turns out." "People applaud when they see Hasidic people." "I had no idea." "Mel Brooks was on to something." "That's right." "I have to give special props to Bill Murray for that little monologue before the song." "Because on that famous recording he did with National Lampoon on a comedy record where he's the jazz musician who's talking to Mr. Rogers the voice that he does in that bit was my inspiration for my little monologue here." "That's funny." "That's Craig Robinson from The Office and the bouncer in Knocked Up who's very funny and apparently punched his landlord while he had laryngitis." "Your Negro man" "Yeah, come on, Dewey." "There was a line before, I don't know if it's in here where the Hasidic Jews look at each other and go:" ""This is racially insensitive."" "Yeah, we just passed it in the extended version here." "This is so crazy, doing these musical numbers, I have to say." "I was prepared in a lot of ways for this movie." "A lot of the acting I was prepared for." "To actually entertain people on a stage with a musical act" "Like, even though I recorded the song I was really kind of improvising my way through all these stage moves and every one of these musical numbers." "Right there, that's improvised." "Right there, a little duck walk." "With such authority." "So you had never done a duck walk before." "The night before, you're not duck walking around the house." "No, I had watched Chuck Berry do it." "I think he's the one we want." "He's got a nice thing." "He's not bad with the singing and the playing and the shaking of the tochis." "My favorite Hasidic line in the movie." "Well, it's just nice to have Harold Ramis around since he's the inventor of so much of what we do." "It's funny when you re-watch" "It's my second time working with Harold." "It's Judd's second or third time?" "Harold high in Orange County is one of his finest moments." "Harold does a whole sequence in Orange County." "It was one of the ideas that most excited me in Orange County." "Harold on ecstasy trying to kiss Colin Hanks." "In the script, actually, it was that he was trying to" "I think I tell this story on the Orange County commentary." "In the script it was" "It was Harold" "His character was supposed to try to blow Colin Hanks' character." "We made an adjustment." "This is so funny, the songs" "The way we picked some of the songs is very careful and deliberate." "And the way we picked other songs especially the covers, was completely improvised and random." "Like, we just were all sitting around trying to think what song should he sing." "In the script it was "Moon River." Then we discovered that "Moon River" was written 1 0 years after the scene was to take place." "And we discovered that like, right at the absolute, last possible moment as we were about to record it after it had been in the script for about a year." "And then someone just tossed out "That's Amore."" "And we whipped up a bluegrass version of "That's Amore."" "This actually was a scene that we never really had a take on how to do the producer." "We knew we wanted, you know the producer who keeps telling you that you're doing a bad job but inspires you to reveal your greatness." "But John Michael Higgins came in and just ripped the shit out of this idea." "And it was one of the most exciting days on the set." "I feel" "Was this the first day with me?" "It was your third" " It was your second day, the third day of shooting." "It was the-- I remember very explicitly because I feel like John Michael Higgins is the guy who made the biggest contribution to this movie in a broad way in terms of the overall tone of the movie, in the shortest time." "He's someone who was working on the movie for, you know, 1 2 hours and really, for me, was like-- This was one of the, like" "Shooting the scene was one of the moments where I watched it." "The combination of having John singing these songs and having these" "John and Higgins, who are both these monster improvisers doing these, like, 1 0-minute takes of this scene and really coming up with crazy, funny stuff." "And this incredible set that Jeff Sage built." "It was like an inspirational set to me." "It got my" " I felt like the movie has to be as good as the set." "That became, like, the bar to get-- And" "I felt bad that we had to tear down the set." "I felt bad that we had to tear down the set." "It was like everybody just-- And the clothes were so good." "Debra McGuire's costumes and Uta Briesewitz really shows-- Who shot the movie with me." "She's the cinematographer." "She shot my last movie also, The TV Set." "It's everybody working at such a sort of strong level." "But this-- The actual text of the scene was, like, not our finest." "And Higgins came in and just so completely got a joke that, in a way, I'm not even sure we fully had computed." "And it really kind of set the pitch for:" "Here's what Walk Hard's gonna be like." "I just remember turning to people after this day and saying:" ""Holy shit." "Higgins came in loaded for bear, man, like--"" "And capped into it like a day or two before." "And I remember saying to him like, "Here's the thing." "It's the producer who doesn't believe in him." "He doesn't believe in him." And he says:" ""Yeah, yup, I got it, I got it." "Sounds good, let's do it."" "Just completely had this move ready to go and it is so funny." "And for our band, we have, you know, Tim Meadows on drums and Matt Besser on piano and Chris Parnell on bass there." "And those are, you know, some of the great comedy actors." "That's the first time we see those guys." "They made a huge contribution." "Talk about setting the tone those guys were like my safety net through the whole thing." "And hugely funny and always good for" "You cut to them for a face and they're always funny." "And this is the first time we hear the song "Walk Hard" by Marshall Crenshaw and us." "But this is Manish Raval and Tom Wolfe who are our music supervisors, said" "You know, as we were starting to get people writing, they said:" ""You know, Marshall Crenshaw is a guy whose sensibility would probably dig this," and they sent it to him." "And Marshall, like, in a couple of days sent back this demo." "And, you know, for using sort of what we had written in the script which was, like, a little" "A fragment of, you know of this in which" " Sort of a direction and the title, Walk Hard, obviously and what that means." "And Marshall just took that and it was a perfect almost instantaneous interpretation where he just" " He got that thing "walk hard, hard" and that lick." "That was it." "He had a great "Take My Hand."" "I want to point out, we have an infant, a chimpanzee and a giraffe in the same scene." "ln the same shot." "That's never been done before." "No, I think it's" " I don't even know if anyone's ever tried." "This scene I enjoyed because when you shot it all these kids were screaming and crying." "And if anything, we brought down the volume of their screaming and crying because it would be disturbing." "It was disturbing Jake a lot." "lt was freaking me out." "I just can't" "You know, I have kids." "I'm used to babies crying." "It just sounds like babies talking to me." "But Jake was like, "l just" " When they cry..." "..." "I just can't take it." -"l can't let children suffer for art."" "Because then if they stop crying, you have to make them cry so it matches." "You gotta have the kid, slap them around to make sure it's all the same." "We had a great baby wrangler on this movie." "When she pulled up in that semi-trailer with those cages in the back...." "It's air-conditioned in there." "They're perfectly comfortable but" "People don't know this, but if you want six babies in a scene you gotta have 27 babies there on set so you can narrow it to the best six and leave the other ones penned." "So" "Look at how her hair sticks out." "Yeah, that's a" "That's a good move." "That's a good hair move." "Digging that, yeah." "This is" " You just missed this" "Just a second ago, she does this classic" "Your body is turning before your face is turning, kind of move." "She does it throughout the movie." "She does it, there's" "In fact, I was looking at a little montage the other day of Kristen turning around in moments." "And she has, like, six crazy turnarounds." "And look, we cut back and she's covered in gobby spit and boogers." "Now, John, will it be hard to act seriously again after all of this?" "Does this ruin drama for you?" "No." "It's all the same." "It's all the same." "Doing drama didn't ruin comedy for me, and, you know...." "I remember when we did Anchorman the whole time we were shooting it it felt like not just mocking anchors, but mocking the whole idea of acting." "The idea of committing and just believing what you're saying." "Well, it is a charade." "This is a extended thing, right there." "Do you think the next time Martin Scorsese calls you'll try to punch up the scene?" "He just did." "I was already doing something." "Do I what?" "Here is Ennis, the Big Bopper." "Ennis from Mr. Show." "We had a prerecord of this, but he said he could handle vocals." "He thought he could do it." "In fact he walked up to me with a very straight face and said:" ""l can do this better than your prerecord." "I can sound exactly like the Big Bopper."" "It turns out" " And Dan Bern, who wrote a bunch of the other songs and sang our prerecord, had actually said to Mike Andrews:" ""l can do this exactly like the Big Bopper."" "It turns out, that's something a lot of people aspire to that you don't know about." "It's one of those secret ambitions that people confess to you." "But Ennis rips that scene." "It's just the most ridiculous gag which is that he's out there with a guitar that he's not playing and a phone." "And that's what the Big Bopper actually did which is he had a guitar strapped on but didn't play it when he did the song." "He was a DJ." "That's" "That's Frankie Muniz and Ed Helms." "That was our original cameo idea was that Frankie would play Buddy Holly and I remember writing it into the script saying:" ""Buddy Holly standing in the wings."" "In parentheses it said, "Frankie Muniz's cameo." And" "Then he keeps repeating his own name so you know it's Buddy Holly because he doesn't look like Buddy." "And then everyone else who's from history and appears in the movie follows that convention." "And here's the first scene that we did where the ghost comes back." "And we ended up removing it from the theatrical version mainly just because" "The movie was nine hours." "The movie was nine hours long and we were discovering that the convention we were making fun of which is where a ghost appears to help explain the psychology of what's happening for the lead character in a moment that would otherwise just be a shot of someone thinking was, in fact, starting to trip us up." "Really what it was, was that John's performance of everything made it so clear where he was in his story to the extent that we were tracking it." "Because making it, you are tracking it." "We did not need the ghost to show up and tell us." "This is one of those crazy scenes-- Filming that scene like, actually getting really emotionally invested in it like a regular drama and then have to have some kind of funny joke gag run at the end of it like that." "This sort of set the tone for a lot of scenes in the movie where I would get really serious and then take some completely cuckoo left turn at the end of the scene." "Jack White came and, I thought, was just very cool and easy to work with." "I mean, l" " You know, you expect to be intimidated because, you know" "Because he's one of the coolest people at the moment." "It's also his real hair, which" "His real hair." "He came with his own hair, yeah." "lmpressive." "I remember thinking, like, when he showed up that we suddenly had credibility that we just otherwise did not have as well as a really good scene." "He could not have been looser, he could not have been funnier." "I mean, I just kind of loved the morning working with him." "This country-gibberish thing was so crazy, like most" "I don't know, most professionally-trained actors would balk at doing an entire scene in gibberish, but Jack's like:" ""Yeah, okay, let's do it."" "Then afterwards when you think-- After working with him you think about the White Stripes music, that I mean, I love and you just go like:" "...and you just go like:" ""Well, yeah, that" " Of course I hear a brain in those songs that could be this completely insane improvising for seven hours."" "I just kept giving him notes." "But really only so the set photographer could take pictures of me talking to him." "I didn't really have anything to say." "Yeah." "I didn't even give notes, I just stood in the background holding a pen." "And it worked." "So here's the performance of "Walk Hard."" "This was for me, in a way, probably the hardest cut from the theatrical movie because the energy of it is so cool." "We did the whole song and Uta shot that scene so beautifully that it really was kind of, like, hard to lose." "Although, we have most of the same shots in the "Life Without You" performance in a second here." "But that "Walk Hard" performance is the centerpiece of our "Walk Hard" music video that is available all over the place." "There were two Playboy Playmates in that scene, by the way." "Yep, yep." "Well, in the coming scene." "No, what we just saw." "The fiddle player and the backup singer, two former" "How did you find out that information?" "When I was pretending to have sex with them, they told me." "How does that come up during sex?" "Both actresses also, and" "Actress-slash-model." "Both really funny and both had sort of parts that are now available to us again in the extended." "This is something that we noticed that made us laugh in Ray was that, it was always the same guy in the bathroom doing drugs." "He wouldn't fight that hard for you not to join him." "He would try to do the quick:" ""Come on, you don't need to do this with me." "I got a problem, you don't--"" ""You're an innocent, you're not ready for this kind of darkness."" "But he's gonna let you join him if you have any- lf you push at all, yeah." "Any energy there." "This was kind of like our first runner, you don't want no part of this shit." "And get ready for the T-shirts." "Yeah." "That's all I gotta say, America." "It was very nice doing this scene for this moment right here." "Where this incredibly beautiful girl named Odette blows smoke in my mouth." "Which has never happened in life." "She's the star" "Not with that girl." "She's one of the stars of Cloverfield." "Yeah." "You heard me, Cloverfield." "And here's "Life Without You." Now this song, Mike Viola wrote." "And I think that in a way...." "In one category, this is mine and, I know, John's favorite song in the movie." "It's a beautiful song, it's an astounding performance from John." "And that is him and almost no one can do this." "Try singing along with this song on your" "Next time you're in the shower." "Most people don't have that physiology or ability or gift." "You know, in the movie, we cut out the parts where he's cheating on his wife in this montage because people were so, I don't know." "They turned on the character to watch him cheat so many times that even though it's a goof on it, they actually got upset." "So we thought maybe it'd be funnier to play the whole song and then cut to him having sex with 1 1 women in one moment." "It's a funny detail of the movie and it does speak to something that John's doing which is...." "The character in all versions of the movie does some really horrendous stuff that it's hard to feel good about as is the thing in movies like this that we're parodying." "But, you know, John gets away with an unbelievable amount of really insidiously bad behavior and it doesn't get in the way of people loving him at all." "And within that-- Like a shot like that." "It's just" " Why test it?" "When you've got that much" "Speaking of Playboy, this girl who I was just having sex with" "Scarlett." "Yeah, she's a former playmate." "She is?" "Yes." "And here she is riding me like a horse." "That's when she told you, right there." "Very fearless." "And he was in what maga--?" "CHUD magazine?" "Parnell?" "Parnell, what magazine was he in?" "The problem with this sequence is that you like John and Dewey so much that...." "That's what I find fascinating, that even though the movie is ridiculous people really believe in the character which is a tribute to John's acting." "And the other thing about that, is just that..." "And the other thing about that, is just that that song is so much-- You don't wanna watch, you know" "The song deserves it's moment and it ended up working that way also." "Now we're about to make movie history." "This is pretty much why we made this movie, Walk Hard." "There was discussion that why can Harvey Keitel show his penis and you can't in a comedy?" "And so we thought, "Well, maybe, you know we've shown the vagina in Knocked Up can we just show the penis for way too long?"" "It's a reasonable question." "And we showed it a lot." "We've seen eight breasts already." "And we're just getting going." "Now, this is a different cut than in the movie, this is...." "This is the more penis cut." "This is the extended cock cut." "It turned out when we showed this to audiences for the first time there was-- You could show too much penis." "And the way that you know that's happened is you're sitting in a crowded movie theater, the penis enters there's a huge reaction, the reaction ends and the penis is still there." "And you're sitting there in silence listening to dialogue." "And suddenly you're in a less crowded theater." "You're stewing in penis at that point." "And then I remember at one test screening you actually hear a woman after the laughter dies down." "The penis is still there and the woman goes:" ""Oh, God."" "It was like she was being assaulted." "We knew in these test screenings that when only two or three people would walk out at the scene, that we had it right." "We were right in the zone there." "This is my favorite part of the entire scene, right here is." "When you reveal what the man looks like who is the owner of the penis." "That's Tyler." "And look how funny he is, he really has a" "That is a hilarious performance." "That is Tyler Nilson who plays Bert." "Yeah, he's really funny." "If you watch our cockumentary also on this DVD, you'll see how funny he is." "I mean, really, legitimately, truly funny." "Like, that's what's great is we ended up with a guy who so completely got that joke he just found the perfect attitude and you don't even need to see his face." "In fact, to see it, it all comes across in the penis." "That is incredible penis acting." "John, why do you think people are so afraid of the penis in this day and age?" "I don't know, I think it has to do with men wanting to keep it mysterious." "As much as" " I don't know." "I know I like to keep a little mystery about mine." "I think" " You know, they say:" ""The only thing more ridiculous than a soft penis is a hard one."" "I think it just makes people uncomfortable, one way or the other." "Well, the hard one actually is the thing I don't think you can do." "And I wonder which of Judd's movies will do that." "That's the next frontier." "That's the final frontier." "The hard-penis comedy." "You'll hang something on it." "And then what, Judd?" "And then the ejaculating hard penis?" "Where does this end?" "Then the anus." "You draw like eyes and a nose next to the anus." "It'll be a little puppet show." "That's where I'm going." "Jim Carrey did that with his pants on, right?" "Didn't he do something like that?" "Talking ass?" "Cut to two years from now Judd on some commentary track somewhere saying:" ""Why can't you have the anus talk in comedies?" "What's the problem?"" "The hole of the penis into a mouth and make two little eyes and do a conversation between an anus and a penis hole." "Is that really so wrong?" "Is there a reason people?" "Is there some reason that society prevents us from doing that?" "It is funny that people are still ashamed of any part of the body." "It is funny that people are still ashamed of any part of the body." "That that actually horrifies some people because it does horrify some people." "Oh, yeah, oh, yeah." "lt freaks people out." "We'll, it'll be very big in Europe." "Yes." "Yeah." "I remember this one woman who said like:" ""l do not want to see a penis."" "And Steve Welch, who's one of our two editors leans over to me and says:" ""Worst girlfriend ever."" "Now do you think that woman is good at sex or not good at sex?" "Because she's either the best or the worst." "I don't think there's a middle ground." "I'm gonna-- I think it's unlikely she's the best." "I'm not afraid to call her out here in the safety of our commentary." "What was funny about it is she said, "l don't like the penis" then the focus group after the screening would talk 1 0 more minutes." "And then she'd go, "One more thing." "Seriously, I don't like the penis."" "That's right, she goes, "l do not wanna see a penis."" "That was the punk "Walk Hard."" "That was one take John recorded that in and I was there for that historic moment." "It was one of the funniest things I've ever seen." "He did the whole song, it's available on something." "iTunes." "I just liked that he'd go:" "Yeah, Dewey was a trendsetter." "He created punk rock in one drug-fueled rehearsal." "Before the world was ready for it." "Yeah." "And here comes Jenna Fischer." "Here she comes." "You heard right." "Looking like a whole different Jenna Fischer." "This is not the Pam" " This is not the Jenna Fischer you know." "This is in a lot of movies, the idea that there's someone that you want to sleep with that you shouldn't because they're religious or you're married or" "But that's actually in a lot of these movies." "How can you tell she's religious?" "She has a 4-inch crucifix hanging around her neck." "Half of her cross is between her cleavage, that's how you knew." "And who's the voice of this song?" "The voice of this song is a woman named Angela Correa." "The writer of this song is a guy named Charlie Wadhams who is another musician that I was friendly with that I knew through all the musicians I hang with, including Mike Andrews." "And my girlfriend's a musician, lnara George and they used to play together all the time and" " She and Charlie." "And he just ripped this." "Charlie was working in a pizza place and writing songs for Walk Hard." "When he'd get off work, he wrote "Guilty As Charged" and the duet." "And I'm gonna hang it out there and say that this is the joke the music joke, that we've gotten the most mileage out of so far." "He just nailed this concept so completely." "Really funny dude." "The song was really sweet and just a great song before we made it all about getting blown." "He wrote the two songs with Benji Hughes and Gus Seyffert I should say, but he" "Charlie, is the man who is" "The man who did the duet." "And Angela was somebody that Mike had worked with and she just has this rocking, sexy voice and it was a great idea." "She came in, we recorded it one night and we all just fell in love with the end result." "They just had, like a-- Sounded exactly right." "And when Jenna hopped on, she eventually had agreed like, "Well, we're not gonna beat that." "That sounds pretty perfect."" "Here's some erotic carpentry." "That's some erotic horse riding." "There's a whinny there." "Shameless whinnying." "An anal-sex joke." "It's got everything you really need." "And I swear this is a joke that my-- My mom drives around L.A singing this song to herself in the car, she tells me." "So it's got something for everyone." "This is where I convinced Jenna to put her back to me when she said this line." "Yep, yep, yep." "Now, John, you resisted the full-blown comedy work for a while." "You were funny in a lot of movies but you didn't go for it in sexual carpentry before." "How do you feel now that this is completed in terms of the arc of it all?" "It's not that I was resisting comedy." "In fact my second movie was a comedy, We're No Angels..." "...and some people didn't think so" "The David Mamet film." "Yeah, well, Neil Jordan directed it, but" "No, I did a lot of funny stuff and more serious movies and some movies I think are just straight-up comedies." "Like Boogie Nights has serious stuff in it but there's an awful lot of laughter in it, but...." "And regardless of the fact that that's true, we're all just gonna continue to perpetuate the mythology that you'd never done anything funny." "I'm gonna say it all the time." "So this is the first time you had ever, in fact, laughed in your life was Talladega Nights and now Walk Hard." "I wish I could say I was so hotly sought after, Judd that I was just turning down big comedy after big comedy." "But the fact is, it took you assholes this long to figure out that I was funny, so...." "You made this decision not to be an enormous comedy star for the first 1 2 years of your career or 1 5 years." "Yeah, I decided I didn't wanna make the kind of money that comedians were making." "It was a noble choice." "And here's a song that John wrote with Mike Viola called "Darlene" clearly about Jenna's character, Darlene." "But we had this hilarious idea for a spelling joke which is that the song is called "Darling."" "Yep." "Get ahold of yourselves." "And" "Yep." "Get ahold of yourselves." "And" "But it's a great song, and John" "Is this Jenna's first scene?" "Was this the first scene Jenna shot in the whole film?" "No." "No, she gave birth." "This was very early, though." "She gave birth in the studio first in the '60s and then she did this." "Was it?" "I think, yeah, very early." "So the first thing she had to do was give birth and then" "No, I'm sorry." "She did that whole "Black Sheep" thing and this was her fist time in the '50s look." "a penis in my vagina." "It's just so silly." "Oh, that's so silly." "Well, we better get some sleep." "I pitched an idea to Parnell for this where he would be dealing himself a hand but you didn't see his hands and it looked like he was just moving his hand rapidly down by his waist." "There's some really gross stuff that's not in the movie from this scene that is somewhere in our deleted stuff in the Line-O-Rama, I think." "Now, where did the horse whinny come from--?" ""I'm ready for sex," cue toilet flush." "That's gotta be one of the sexiest beginnings of a sex scene ever." "What exactly are you flushing down the toilet?" "That's the question." "I had to get myself ready." "I had to evacuate all the things in me that are not part of sex." "That was such a great ad lib." ""I'm ready for sex."" "Just like, no Barry White here." "And then, I don't know why I decided to prance like a horse here." "But I'm so glad you did." "I was feeling virile, I guess." "One of the things I thought was so funny it was this instinct Jenna had which is that no matter what Dewey is doing she's gonna treat it like it's the hottest thing she's ever seen." "And I thought that was a really funny joke that I kept pushing which is just, as ridiculous as he is anywhere, she's" "Darlene loves it." "And here's the big confrontation." "I feel as though I wrote this scene 20 or 30 times and it was never actually that different, and I just know that I kept" "For some reason we kept revisiting this." "But both-- Everybody here is so funny to me." "The ankles, that's a Lew Morton" "See, that's why you have Lew Morton with you for a year, is because at the critical moment he says:" ""Maybe Dewey should be holding Darlene's ankles up in his shot through the whole scene."" "And you realize like, "Yes, I almost let that slip how could that have happened?"" "That's only the kind of thing you learn how to do by working at Futurama." "That's just a brilliant" " I mean, look." "That and robot jokes." "Makes the scene for me." "I pitched robot jokes..." "...none of which got in the movie." "No, Lew." "No robots in this movie." "I don't know about holding her ankles but my hips are pressed against her bottom for the entire scene here." "And you don't even get credit for that, because it's off camera." "I know." "And you're playing it." "But I have my memories." "Yep." "Edith, don't go either!" "He's trying to keep it all together." "Here's some power running I always thought was funny." "We kept it going a long time and I like this little veer-off at the end." "I wanna thank Tom Cruise for the power-running-straight-hands move." "I like that there's a camel on the lawn for no apparent reason, it's never discussed." "It's just that the exotic animals have expanded." "And this baby's really crying and that" " I think we tried" "Look, see, the baby went into head-down position." "I think we cut around the idea of how many tears were coming out of that baby because it was a little" "The baby was scared of you." "The baby did not like that you were yelling at Mama." "And then you softened your performance a little bit to stop the baby from crying so hard." "You just raise your voice, and they think they're in trouble or something." "I don't know, I kept saying, "I'm acting, shut up."" "But that didn't help." "Kristen Wiig is so funny and pregnant in literally every scene of the movie." "So she has that high school thing where she's" "And she's so, like, appealing and everything." "I think, in high school, she's just adorable." "And then for every subsequent scene she's pregnant and usually has snot dripping off of her face and her hair is doing crazy" "And right at the end she gets one more moment to look respectable." "I have two wedding rings on for this entire scene because I'm double married at this point." "Which, you know, a lot of people have mentioned to me." "Really?" "The double wedding rings, yeah." "We get a lot of the:" ""He still forgot, even though he has two wedding rings."" "Well, he wanted to honor both things and technically was in a contract with both women." "That's exactly right." "A lot of people were upset because that monkey got paid more than most of the actors in the movie." "That's not a cheap thing to get a trained monkey that won't rip your testicles off mid-scene." "If you want the one that doesn't do the testicle ripping you gotta pay extra for that." "The whole time that chimpanzee was around, everyone on set..." "The whole time that chimpanzee was around, everyone on set walked up and said, "Did you hear that story about that chimpanzee that attacked its owners when they were visiting it?"" "And I think someone said that to me as I was holding the chimpanzee." "Yeah, speaking of the chimp this scene, like, he didn't know" "We had been doing it much more gentle and then I start swearing at him, like, you know, getting mad at him because Jake thought the chimp was too cute and the scene was getting too cute." "And I was like, "John, tell him off." "No, really, tell him off." "Get mad."" "And then he came out with it, "Fuck you, monkey."" "Can't argue with that." "And then I had to, like, apologize to the chimp every time." "Because I'd turn back and he'd be like, this shocked looked on his face." "At least he didn't decide to kill you, though." "No, he was too young to kill me still but he's got it in for me." "I'm sure someday when he's older he's gonna come find me." "You'll work on some other-- A Paul Thomas Anderson movie." "You won't know it's the same monkey and then he's gonna rip your nose off." "Here's a funny thing, which is that the woman that John's about to be having sex with" "Well, one of the two women that John's about to be having sex with came in, says to us, "I'm friends with Tyler."" "Who is the guy who had played Bert whose penis it is." "It was like we had gotten a reputation in a few weeks" "Not this woman, this is Deanna Brooks." "She's a Playmate." "Yeah." "It's my third Playmate in the movie." "But we had gotten a reputation for people who do crazy things with naked people." "We were trying to think of things that he'd do that would be mean to his band because we were reading Elvis'" "All these books about Elvis written by all his old pack of friends." "So that later they can tell him to fuck off, and one was taking his wife." "I ain't asking' God to forgive my sins" "Now, I'll tell you a funny story." "For my 1 0th anniversary, I woke up my wife with a mariachi band on the lawn in the morning, and it's these guys." "Really?" "Yes." "That's funny." "Which I only realized" "This is Tyler's friend who came along because she heard Tyler had a good time on the movie." "She was a good sport." "This is also a moment because this is a scene that shows here Parnell and the guys." "Meadows, if you look at what he's doing those guys are playing that song and none of those guys play those instruments." "In fact, none of them played at all except Tim played some other instruments, not drums." "They learned all the songs in the movie and they really let me hear about it." "They worked really hard and they deserve all the credit in the world and they take all the credit in the world." "Now, there's a scene there that we cut out." "One of the scenes we cut out was lan Roberts selling drugs to John." "And the premise was basically that he was so clearly an undercover cop who keeps saying, "Yes, I will sell you drugs." "How much drugs do you want?" "I need $50 for the drugs."" "All right, this is where the academy members need to pay attention." "This is where I do a scene in Yiddish, not my native language and I cry at the same time." "That's pretty much, like, Best Actor kind of thing, I think." "The thing that really amazed me about this scene where it just really blew me away, is not only is it in Yiddish which John doesn't speak, but John is reading the Yiddish off of Harold's hat." "You're not supposed to tell that part." "You just blew my academy shot." "No, it's better, it's amazing." "No, I think that increases the-- -lt does?" "Yeah, well there's a special category." "There's a special dispensation for Yiddish cue cards in the academy voting." "A real heartfelt performance." "Here's my dream shot." "That sucks you in, that's" "Here's my dream shot." "That sucks you in, that's" "A dream shot to work with Harold Ramis our first big face-to-face scene, and he has to have Yiddish words on a piece of paper, taped on the brim of his hat so I can't see his eyes." "You made magic." "Yeah, that's true." "These two actors are both members of the Jake Kasdan Repertory Company." "David Doty, who plays the doctor, has been in literally everything I've ever done." "It's an essential part of the casting process for me is where's Doty gonna go?" "And Willow the nurse, is a very good friend and she's so funny doing this." "They're both, like, way overqualified for this particular scene but were so funny." "This was kind of a fun, crazy day." "During this rehab stuff, John was actually restrained tied to the bed." "There's a bunch of stuff in a bathtub." "So he's, like, lying in a bathtub like, kind of naked, right?" "Yeah." "Like, naked-y?" "Pretty much naked." "And with" "You know, for hours." "Just sort of living the experience." "This is something I notice in a lot of movies." "That there is usually a sex scene that was way too animalistic." "Where they were both having sex and kind of beating the shit out of each other." "And this may be my proudest moment." "When passions are unleashed sometimes civility goes out the window." "And when the tension's been building for as long as it has been between Darlene and Dewey and it's still an unconsummated relationship even after all that carpentry and everything." "We have body doubles here for part of this in the" "See if you can tell where." "In the theatrical version, it's-- We did it a little bit." "Here" "In this version, you'll see a little bit more." "This kind of fake kiss always annoys me in movies." "This is something that I've been irritated by for many years." ""I'm going to, I'm not going to"?" "Oh, yeah." "It drives me crazy." ""Let's do it, let's not do it."" "It does feel like the decision is basically made." "Because this is the tough part to make sense as an actor is the guy pulling back from the woman's kiss." "A woman can pull back, but once a woman comes at you guys do not pull back away from the kiss." "Especially once a woman comes at you after you've just gone at her." "Exactly." "It's like Dewey is suddenly reconsidering." "Sometimes sex is so good you have to" "The only thing left to do is to choke each other." "It's like Townshend's gotta break the guitar." "Sometimes you just have to also punch him in the balls." "Look at my abs." "Man, this was my proudest moment of the movie when I got myself in this shape." "John really turned his body around for this thing." "There's a very different John, rather than you see in Talladega Nights." "John, how long did you work out for this role?" "I grew extra-- I put, what's that stuff, nonoxidol?" "Or whatever, the hair growing-- Rogaine." "I put Rogaine on my ass for this shot." "And then waxed your chest, yeah." "Normally my ass is kind of hairless." "And the funny thing about that sex scene is that Lew" "And the funny thing about that sex scene is that Lew" "I had to go shoot the old, you know, the blues thing in the beginning of the movie and so I left Lew with the body doubles to shoot just random porn footage and he was seriously traumatized by it." "And in some ways I think still is." "He probably will never want to direct because of that experience." "It was the most uncomfortable experience in my life but now I have a porn-directing career." "It's Jerry Garcia." "Hey!" "Casey, Jones, watch your speed." "Now there's a joke to be proud of." "I believe I pitched that one." "And here's" "I'll take credit for that one." "It's a good one." "Here we see Dewey, Darlene, things have changed." "It's the '60s now, times are changing." "They wear floral stuff their hair is changed." "This is probably a good moment to give a quick shout-out to Lori" "Lori Guidroz." "and John Blake, who was the" "Lori was the hair artist and John was the makeup artist and Lori just did" "There's some amazing hair in this movie and some of our best hair is still to come." "But it's worth noting she just did so much incredible sort of character-design work with us, figuring it out with John and l" "So if you're watching the movie just for the hair sit tight because there's a lot more great hair in it." "That's right, and I recommend that fans do that." "It's worth just watching the movie once just for hair." "Think about that." "This song, "Royal Jelly," was written by Dan Bern." "Early on in the script-writing process, Judd and I had this idea that Dewey would have a political period that would be manifested as he sings a bunch of songs where he sounds exactly like Bob Dylan and they're all these sort of long, incomprehensible metaphor songs." "And as soon as we'd had that idea there was Dan, who's a good friend of mine, and so funny was clearly the first phone call." "I called him up." "He was actually driving to L.A. that day." "He lives in New Mexico." "The next morning, he showed up literally at my door with a CD with four Dylan-esque, crazy, metaphor songs and that was one of them." "This is the little-person song." "And for a long time, we resisted the cutaway to little people at the protest rally, but in the end, we just relented." "We just" " It got-- It beat us." "It beat us." "I even said, I said:" ""You know, all these different, crazy protest things we're doing are all funny." "I just" " I don't see myself standing on the set with a bunch of little people around me and, like, trying to pick them up and stuff." "I just draw the line there, and it turns out the little people that we hired for this scene that we ended up shooting thought this song was really funny." "They thought the song was funny, and they're acting it great." "When they look at each other, they're doing this" "Lew had a really funny idea about how to do it which is that they are militant, little-people separatists." "Black Panther militants." "They're the short-power movement." "So they're playing sort of tough, militant little people and their nodding, the way they look at each other is really funny." "We shot it when John wasn't there." "Dewey's singing the truth." "We made a point of shooting when John wasn't there to make John comfortable." "The Short Panther Party." "That's exactly right." "You were intimidated by them." "You were intimidated by them." "Hey, it's the Beatles." "We always knew we were gonna do a sequence with the Beatles." "And the basic idea was, "What if Paul McCartney and John Lennon just cursed each other out and actually physically fought?"" "Jack Black committed first." "Then there was a long debate about who could play the Beatles." "Paul Rudd, who looks like no Beatle and sounds like no Beatle you know, gets big laughs." "And Schwartzman seems like he's thought about this before in his life." "Schwartzman, turns out, is a huge, lifelong Ringo Starr fan." "And Justin Long, I guess, can do an impression of every Beatle." "Not just George." "Justin Long has a separate imitation for each Beatle which is, again, try that at home sometime." "Not easy." "I wanna point out, also, that Paul Rudd was the first actor and only actor in the movie who had the nerve to directly address the camera." "To look directly into the lens to say his line." "Which I was tempted to do many times but I refused to break that fourth wall." "But Rudd did it on his one day on the movie." "Yeah." "Well, the Beatles would do that." "They'd do a little look." "And the thing about looking into the lens which I've heard the Office guys" "The British Office guys talk about before is that once you do it, it's hard to stop doing it and you do it all the time, and" "The lens becomes your friend." "The lens becomes your friend." "In fact, over the course of this, Rudd is kind of doing it on every other line and then suddenly Jack is looking into the lens and eventually, I had to draw the line." "I stepped out there, I said, "Beatles, stop looking into the lens."" "I don't know if you put any of this in the extended cut but one of the things this day" "These four guys are incredible, incredible comedians." "But listening to Gerry Bednob, who plays the Maharishi, swear I could have sat cross-legged for eight hours Iistening to him say swear words, and I would've" "It would've made me perfectly happy." "It just made me laugh so hard." "What was he saying?" "Oh, just everything." "Like, similar to, you know 40 Year Old Virgin, where he just goes on these incredibly blue runs." "Is any of it in the movie?" "We don't have him cursing." ""Beatles, Beatles, please." "We can't have you saying, 'Cock, shit, ass."'" "It became the same joke." "Well, the thing is that Judd had done it to such great effect in Virgin...." "This was a really fun day, though." "Yeah, it was amazing." "That was pretty insane." "That was a lot of firepower under one roof." "lt was a really fun 1 7-hour day." "Yeah." "It was a very long day." "At one point, we were trying to get Sacha Baron Cohen to take part in this scene in some capacity." "And he said that, you know" "He was too busy." "He was very busy." "And then the day we shot it, he came and visited for three hours." "Because his office was on the lot." "Turns out, he was busy in the morning." "But even Sacha could feel the gravitational pull of how much fun that was." "This was Jenna's last thing in the movie, done at like 3 in the morning and that was pretty crazy." "...and that was pretty crazy." "At one point, there was talk of Stephen Merchant from Extras playing Brian Epstein." "He had a vacation planned." "This is something that we talked about for a long time and only achieved in the last 25 minutes before we locked the movie." "But this is an animated LSD sequence by Geoff McFetridge who's a great graphic artist and artist and animator and friend of the organization, and...." "My favorite thing are the noses." "Yeah." "Jack, you know, the Paul McCartney character almost has, like, a little pig nose." "And yours is curiously kind of red." "Yeah." "And there, all the environment's, like, giving him the finger." "It's a really funny cartoon." "And this thing is funny because that horizontal entrance from Ringo was an idea that some Beatles had that day." "I think it was Jack and Rudd had that idea." "And so they were actually, like physically handling this, like, equipment cart that was, like" "Jack and Rudd are right off camera actually inserting Schwartzman into that shot." "There was a lot of discussion when we were writing about how much drug use was too much because he's on pot, he's on coke, he's on pills...." "And it's basically" " It's the main thing that happens in the movie." "And we said, like, "ls this whole movie this guy on drugs?"" ""Are we making a drug movie?" There was that funny moment." ""We thought we were making a big rock movie but is this actually a drug movie?"" "The one drug we were never able to make funny was heroin." "That was the tough one." "There was one sequence that we wrote where he's on the Ed Sullivan Show performing a song and he's forgotten to take the heroin needle out of his arm." "And as he plays guitar, it's shaking around and that temporarily sets back his career because it's in the paper that he's corrupting children by doing heroin" "But hats off to Danny Boyle for Trainspotting." "For actually achieving funny heroin." "So here's the extended "Black Sheep" sequence." "And this was something that we really...." "We really did a lot of work to make this happen and ended up pulling it from the movie pretty early just in the interest of, you know, having the movie keep moving." "And we knew it would eventually find its right place here." "Extended, unbearably long, self-important director's cut." "Complete with Thanksgiving dinner on the trampoline." "I remember reading this biography about the Beach Boys and Brian Wilson and it was actually kind of sad that he" "He was writing these amazing songs." "And everyone else in the band thought that they weren't the Beach Boys' recipe." "That he was doing something terrible by trying to change what they were succeeding with." "And so we really got into our "Black Sheep" sequence." "But other than the hardest-core Beach Boys fanatics some of the details may have been too specific, if you will." "Yeah." "And, I mean, you know...." "We also were watching that Springsteen documentary where he recorded the song "Born to Run" for six months and couldn't stop working on it." "It's an amazing documentary." "Wings for Wheels, about the process of going crazy while making a record." "That was part of it." "Just let him work it out." "Brian Wilson, when that was happening, was making Pet Sounds which a lot of people think is the best rock album ever made." "So we believe that Dewey was making "Black Sheep."" "Here was one of the greatest rock albums ever made." "And this scene we cut out of the movie early, again, but I love it and John is pretty amazing here." "Oh, they were tangy." "They were very tangy." "This is dark, though." "Some dark stuff we're-- We're enjoying." ""Tangy and salty."" "And the song that they perform here was written by Van Dyke Parks, which is strange because he wrote many of the great songs with Brian Wilson, so we thought:" ""Could we ask the guy, on some level, to satirize himself?"" "Van Dyke worked with...." "He cowrote with Brian Wilson." "Cowrote with Brian Wilson all of the Smile record and was very present for Pet Sounds at that time." "He would write the music or the words, or what was Van Dyke's--?" "He did the arrangements, and I believe a lot of the lyrics at different times, and it wasn't always the same." "They were working together all the time." "And he wrote the song "Black Sheep" with Mike Andrews." ""Black Sheep Parts 1 and 2," as it became known." "Initially because it was actually in two parts in the script but I just then thought it was funny that Dewey had named his" "Had made a song" " Had made two songs with the same title part one and part two, like it's this song cycle." "And this montage we did in about a day and I always loved this thing." "But I do think it's something that you love if you're...." "It's not" " It's more about loving music, and I love what John's like here." "How was it improvising with a goat?" "What does the goat give you back?" "I couldn't get the goat to say anything." "It was a bummer." "What was harder to improvise with, the goat or the penis?" "The goat." "The goat was tougher to work with than the penis." "The penis, you know we had a great relationship." "This was fun, getting to be around an actual orchestra." "All these people could really play." "There's Charlie Wadhams" "Yeah, Charlie was playing drums." "Oh, this was great." "This girl was amazingly patient with me as I probed her breasts with microphones." "John says, "Would it bother you if I stuck these microphones into your breasts?" She says, "No."" "Yeah, the weird, little approval conversations I would have to have with people." "You know, like" ""Would it make you uncomfortable?"" "Does it make you uncomfortable, John to do that with the naked women?" "No, she was a beautiful person." "It's funny." "There's a lot of anxiety about it that first day." "But when you've got as much of it as we had in this movie by the time you've done the orgy scene...." "Yeah, you broke me like the wild stallion on this one." "You kept just throwing more and more ridiculous stuff at me." "Next thing I knew, I was in a diaper, running down a city street, you know?" "But you fought for that diaper." "There was a moment where the stunt people said:" ""We can't do all the stunts if he's in a diaper."" "John was like, "I'm putting my foot down." "I wanna be in a diaper."" "If you take PCP, which I'm about to do" "If you take PCP, everyone knows that the first thing you do is you take off all your clothes, you get really sweaty and you start breaking windows and laughing at the police." "That's right." "Yeah." "Anyone who's watched Cops even once knows that." "So I wanted to be a stickler about that." "Also, I felt" " You know, they were like, "Maybe underwear of some kind."" "I was like, "No, we've seen that, you know?"" "I just did Talladega Nights, Will ran around in his underwear." "I've gotta kick it up a notch." "Get me a swami thong." "There's not a lot of PCP humor out there in modern movies." "No." "No." "It's not an area that people have mined much for comedy." "These guys are incredible in this." "They are so funny." "You just roved back and forth with the camera with these three amazing improvisers." "And one after the other they just came up with the most ridiculous things." "Chris Parnell can lose his temper funnier than anyone I've ever seen." "And it really is" " This was another one of these days where you go, like:" ""Man, there's some seriously funny guys in a very small space right there."" "I love that they're talking about getting Siamese cats because there's a great Warren Zevon song called "Porcelain Monkey" about Elvis." "And the chorus is, "He gave it all up for a porcelain monkey."" "And it's funny that we hit that." "That cat thing must be based on something." "Someone heard that song." "Yeah, I think so." "Or that story." "No, I'm the one who pitched that." "Oh, did you?" "Where's it from?" "We were talking about how-- I don't know." "We were talking about how-- I don't know." "It just seemed like a really lame kind of Christmas gift where someone gives you the same thing every year like a glass Siamese cat." "Sounded funny, and then we just kept talking about it." "This was Jenna's first real scene, actually." "This was her first real acting." "She did that thing in the booth but this was her first real scene, and" "This feels like the scene, like, when I'm home with the flu and I'm watching cable, that I'll always click channels and this is the scene that'll come on." "I think that's probably true." "I ended up getting really, like, emotionally upset during this scene." "We were talking about addiction and relationship stuff and, like, it ended up becoming this very real scene." "And then, at the end, I pop PCP in my mouth and try to pretend that it's candy." "It's just" " If you look at their two faces in this next couple of shots here this is what I mean when I say in all these interviews:" ""A level of acting this movie doesn't deserve."" "I'm talking about this." "Like, this is just two really, really good actors doing an emotional low point of a movie." "And within seconds we'll be flipping cars and throwing mailboxes." "That's what makes it exciting." "Never know what's coming." "It was such an odd thing to have to do." "In the middle of real tears, like, really crying and sobbing." "Like, do the gag, then pop the thing in my mouth." "Almost had to force myself to do it." "At one point, you said it was easier to cry doing this than in a real movie because there's such pressure in a real movie." "That's true, that's true because, I don't know, it just gave me all kinds of room." "Like, if I don't really cry, it doesn't matter, it's a comedy." "If I do, isn't that weird?" "Oh, that's a nice shot of my ass there." "Now, there's Clayton Townsend, our producer, our other producer in that car." "And this song, "There's a Change A'Happening, I Can Feel lt" is one that we had recorded for the...." "Just as a part of Dewey's '60s canon." "Another nice shot of my ass." "Thank you very much." "Yep." "Yep." "Yep." "A really nice shot of your ass, and" "It's his "Blowin' in the Wind."" "When we were starting to put the scene together, we needed score." "It came to the point where we had recorded so many songs we were like, "We have enough songs that we can use songs he's not performing in the movie as score for the movie like you would in the actual biopic," which was a very...." "I got to do so many different movies all at once in this one." "That was like getting to be the incredible Hulk for a day." "That PCP rampage." "Yeah." "And here we are." "It's Chip." "Wait a second." "It's Jonah Hill." "What was funny about this is when we first showed it it was before Superbad came out, and it got some laughs." "And then Superbad came out and then we showed it the week after and then we got applause when Jonah came on-stage." "It was like Steve Martin hit the screen." "Yeah." "Yeah." "It's funny because we shot Jonah's part of this scene after we'd shot pretty much the whole movie." "So I'm acting with the young boy, and then we inserted Jonah later and the scene still works." "Jonah did some good riffing." "He riffed the:" ""You ever try to masturbate with a ghost hand?"" "Yeah." "Here he did some funny stuff." "Although, actually, wait, wait, wait." "I'm gonna rewrite history." "I thought of that." "I believe it." "Good joke." "Good joke, Judd." "I just wanna own that one." "I'm taking that back from his" "I think you've given him enough." "He can give you that." "This scene, it's true, worked really well and part of the way that works, I've gotta say" "I have to say right now, as we head into this next sequence that part of how we manage all this stuff...." "Here's the bookend re-inserted." "But part of the way we can get all of these crazy jokes and then eventually make it work is that a team of editors and then eventually make it work is that a team of editors sit there with me every minute for six months going crazy trying to figure out the configurations of how to make all that sort of fit together." "And that's Tara Timpone and Steve Welch who led that effort." "And you find a way to take these incredibly funny performances and make them work." "And this next sequence which is basically a restored version of the thing." "This is a lot more of it than what was in the theatrical movie." "There's some serious editing work in here." "Just complicated sequences, lots of music." "It's the second scene with David Krumholtz who is a real biopic veteran." "He played this same part in Ray." "The exact same part." "But he had to be a lot more serious in Ray." "Yeah." "He played the same part, and it said that in the script." "But it is nice to have this extended, self-indulgent version of the movie and be able to put all this stuff in here." "But we didn't put the grunge song in here." "There was a moment here where Dewey plays a song he's working on and it sounds just like a kind of Pearl Jam, Nirvana song." "And it's like he's created grunge." "And David Krumholtz says:" ""l don't like it." "It's all depressing." "I don't know what the word is." "It's grungy."" "This is" " When we talk about watching the movie just for hair" "When you're on that pass of the movie the hair pass, this is a scene where you will just" "This is a scene to be studied." "There's some amazing hair work going on here." "Both John's do for this period of his life which I love and all these guys in the band, who are all our actual" "There's Mike Andrews and Mike Viola, from left to right." "And the whole band are the guys who are playing on the tracks." "At least some of the tracks." "All of them." "Everyone furnished with some hair to be proud of." "Including everyone in the audience." "There's some great extra hair." "Yeah, some great hair." "And there she is." "There's the lovely Cheryl Tiegs, who I can attest is a very sexy mature woman." "She's a" "Of all the people I had to kiss in the movie" "And I'm probably giving something away and offending some people here." "I really enjoyed kissing Cheryl Tiegs a lot." "And I don't know if this is gonna sound weird but I really enjoyed watching you kiss Cheryl Tiegs." "Really?" "ls that uncomfortable for all of us?" "Well, I don't-- Is it uncomfortable for me to admit that I really enjoyed watching you, Judd watch John kiss Cheryl Tiegs?" "Is it weird that I have the dailies at home?" "And here's a really wild thing, which is John and Cheryl singing "You Don't Have to Be a Star to Be in My Show" in a very provocative way." "Yeah." "But we recorded an actual duet." "John did his part and then Cheryl came and sang her part, and...." "There's Lew and Melvin as the horse." "The freaky thing is that Cheryl" "Cut out of the movie somehow." "Yeah, somehow." "There's so many meta movemen" "There are so many meta moments in this movie so many, like, bizarre jokes on top of jokes." "And having Cheryl Tiegs in the '70s period just one of these strange things." "Like, she actually lived through that whole pop-culture moment for real, and now here she is young- and beautiful-enough-looking to be in it, in a movie." "Playing herself, and she was hilarious." "I will say that this sequence, which is largely cut from the movie could not be denser with ideas and stuff that we did including that song "Who Wants to Party?" which is Dewey's disco hit that Mike Viola wrote and then we recorded, and the whole thing, like" "It's like if I could play myself in a movie that took place in the 1 990s in the year 2025 and still look pretty much the same." "Yeah, yeah." "I remember that both Cheryl Ladd and Cheryl Tiegs both talked about how they were on, you know  The Donny and Marie Show and all of these shows." "I just said, "I'm" "Next week I'm gonna take a shit on Donny and Marie in the ratings."" "This thing was all shot as, like, a moving Steadicam shot." "It's broken into pieces now, but I go from Patrick Duffy to Morgan Fairchild to Cheryl Ladd to Cheryl Tiegs." "Yeah." "ln about one and a half minutes." "Yeah, and we did that on the day of the premiere for my movie The TV Set which came out while we were shooting." "And there was definitely a moment where Lew and I were sitting there on set, thinking:" ""ls there any way to work this where Patrick Duffy, Cheryl Ladd Cheryl Tiegs and Morgan Fairchild all come with me to the premiere of TV Set tonight?"" "But I wasn't able to figure out how to make that work." "I'm still very upset that didn't happen." "There's your second Cheryl you've made out with in 30 seconds in the movie." "All these guys were so game and funny and there to play." "There was an actual, you know recurring problem for Cheryl Tiegs and Cheryl Ladd where people were confusing them because they're both named Cheryl." "Yeah." "We sort of waded our way into the middle of that." "Yeah." "But they were so funny." "There's Warhols of Dewey, back there." "This is kind of the cocaine period, like he was on coke in the '70s." "This is the cocaine period which is part of why it's not in the movie, is" "In the theatrical movie." "is we eventually realized that" "You can't top PCP." "where we needed Dewey to be at this moment in the story to set up his redemption was not coked up and partying the whole time, it was" "Depressed." "depressed and suffering so that we could feel that he was making progress." "So we eliminated this cocaine idea and replaced it with the working-out idea." "This is my favorite part him talking about how happy he is while on cocaine." "But we wanted the audience then to think that he was missing Darlene and that his life went to the crapper after that." "Basically, it's just a different version of what it's like when Dewey is feeling low." "This is the denial version." "Now, here's" " This thing is" "We've all been there, where we're the last guest at a party." "Yeah." "John did like a 1 0-minute run of this that is insanely funny of him and the guy that" "Character of the last guy at the party, who was an extra who couldn't talk." "So it was just John hanging on him just telling him sad shit, and I remember thinking, like:" ""That Reilly's got that move like nothing I've ever seen."" "And then who knew that David Bowie's music would sound good in a big, showy, Vegas style?" "Yeah, I know." "This is sort of the most irreverent...." "I have to say, this recording, this cover probably made all the music geeks on the movie laugh the most doing "Starman" in that kind of Doc Severinsen treatment." "And the way you're singing it there." "Yeah, this TV show I think is an idea that if it were up to" "I've spent two years working nonstop on Walk Hard:" "The Dewey Cox Story and if someone walked up to me tomorrow and said:" ""Would you like to spend next year working on The Dewey Cox Variety Show?" part of me would just immediately be like:" ""Yeah, sure." "There's a" "I've always felt we could've done sketches." "We could've...."" "Monologues." "Monologues." "For Lew and I this was like one of the running joys of this movie was coming up with new stuff for the variety show that we would then not use." "At one point, I wrote five sketches." "Yeah, that's right." "I was just trying to convince myself maybe we'd shoot them." "There was a caveman sketch there was a Knights of the Round Table sketch." "Oh, I'm not gonna promise that." "Whatever you're comfortable with." ""l don't smoke angel dust anymore."" "And here she comes." "Well, this scene we shot" "This was an additional shoot." "to try to clarify where Dewey was in his life." "So when he sang his final song you would feel that he had finally learned all the lessons of his life:" "To get his wife back and to know the names of his children, for a start and to kind of make fun of the lessons that people learn in these movies." "Because the truth is, the movies always try to make it look like someone learned some great lesson but people probably didn't." "You know, they probably didn't." "They probably died on drugs." "Well, and also that they do in the way that you do when you're a rock star who's completely lost touch with reality." "And I always think that that's a really funny thing, which is where" "The way that John looks here, in addition to what he's saying it's a very soulfully performed set of jokes with him describing how miserable things are." "And yet he's doing it within the confines of that wig and then that leather suit that, like" "Nothing screams "I've lost touch with what's important" like a floral, burgundy leather suit." "I've got that jacket in my car right now." "It was so funny when you" "When we were doing some research for clothes this" "John and Debra and I really had a pretty serious party with the clothes on this movie." "And when we would look at what the actual guys from" "That would've been Dewey's contemporaries wore later in life it was always kind of incredible." "There was this documentary John and I watched about Roy Orbison that interviewed all these guys at various times." "And what they're wearing-- They're always so much cooler than" "I mean, you know, they're as cool as possible and wearing the craziest stuff from the 1 950s to the 1 980s, when that documentary was made." "That jacket was made by South Paradiso Leathers here in Los Angeles." "Yeah, yeah, yeah." "As were many of the rock-star-looking jackets and clothes for the movie." "Joel, Joel the leather man." "Here's some extended-- More sexiness." "We were trying to show that, you know in his life, he was going through a down period so he couldn't get an erection for three women of every possible nationality." "You'll notice in the set dressing, if you look it's as though there are two sort of testicle chandeliers hanging on the sides of his bed." "I know." "All I'm asking is that you write one masterpiece that is the culmination of your entire life." "Jonah Hill." "See how we're getting the story going?" ""I'm just asking for one masterpiece."" "We're revving up to the ending here." "You know, a big" "A movie that was influential on this movie that most people wouldn't think of is Beyond the Sea where there was a lot of Bobby Darin you know, talking to himself as a kid and a lot of ghosts." "That movie, they actually break into song." "The ghosts?" "Everybody." "It's as though" "Yeah." "It's kind of a musical." "People also" "There are sequences where, in dramatizing a moment of his life they break into song, you know, and a dance number." "And this was a-- Something that we reshot." "We originally shot them out on a boat." "And after finally making up and Pa explaining that he never really was mad it was a misunderstanding." "When he said the wrong kid died he meant some other kid should've died not him." "And then they start sailing and the sail swings around and cuts his dad in half." "And for some reason it actually was deeply sad and troubling and we thought, "Maybe we need a machete fight." "Maybe we need the dad to have been planning to murder him at this point."" "And that turned out to be true, I guess." "So we called up Ray." "We said, "Here's the idea." "It involves you to look fierce with a machete."" "And he started practicing for two weeks machete twirling." "But didn't he say to you, "What'd I do wrong last time?"" "Yeah, that's right." ""What'd I do wrong?"" "He said, "Did I screw it up?"" ""No, you didn't screw it up."" "That's actually the fine line of this type of acting, is...." "We think the scenes are so silly when we write them but then these great actors read them and they actually get tragic and sad." "Even though it's a man cut in half by a mast." "And here's some machete action." "You can see he has, in fact, been practicing slicing Nate." "John, you stopped playing Dewey Cox." "Then we were shooting Step Brothers." "You had to come back in the middle of Step Brothers for a few days to pick up a couple of scenes." "How was that transition back and forth to Dewey?" "Well, once you get a handle on Cox you know, it's always there with you." "No, you know, yeah, it was difficult." "It was difficult, but it had to be done, so, you know." "Champions adjust, Judd." "And now you're going out on a little mini-tour to promote the movie." "I'm about to play some music tonight at the Roxy." "We're gonna change the name of the club to the Coxy for one night only." "So is this a thing that is gonna be hard to shake in your life?" "Like, are you gonna every year feel like it's important to have, like, a Dewey Cox anniversary show?" "How much Cox is in your future?" "Are you saying, how hard is it gonna be to shake Cox?" "How hard is it gonna be to let go of Cox?" "Yeah, well...." "No, I don't know, we'll see." "We'll see how much people love Dewey Cox." "And if they do then I would be happy to make a little mi" "You know, a little" "I think regardless of how people feel about it you should just bring it out and work it for a long" "But now you have songs." "Every holiday." "This is like, if you show up at a club to see the White Stripes, they can go:" ""Hey, come on-stage and do 'Walk Hard."'" "You have a little canon." "Yeah, we'll see if that happens." "You know, maybe they'll even give me like a month in Vegas at, like, you know, one of those casinos." "I can be Dewey on-stage every night." "Yeah, that's a good idea." "You could be a greeter, like Joe Louis or Willie Mays." "However long we worked on this movie I still really enjoy a Cox joke." "Me too." "Me too." "Yeah." "Still finding new ones." "And as many as there are in the theatrical movie there's a good 30 more in this extended version of the movie." "Now, this" "This is where the" "You describe it, Judd." "Well, this is a scene that I really enjoyed." "Just a fistfight with Patrick Duffy." "He's always been a reference." "Will Ferrell and Adam McKay always like to say "Patrick Duffy" in things." "And it really was the only way to top them was to actually get Patrick Duffy and have John beat him senseless." "I have to say, on my way home from work this day I called Will Ferrell and left him a message saying:" ""Dude, I gotta tell you what I did today." "I got in a slap fight with Patrick Duffy." "The real Patrick Duffy."" "That's the line I love, is-- Cheryl says to him:" ""Stop it, Dewey, you animal." "Patrick Duffy's just saying what we're all feeling."" "And then I say:" ""You stay the hell away from me, Cheryl Cox-Tiegs."" "Yeah, that's right." "That's her married name." "This was one of the original ideas for the movie." "A crazy amount of destruction starting with the gold records and headlights and then leading to...." "Destroying a Zen garden." "Destroying a Zen garden." "Sort of slightly messing up a Zen garden." "And then" "Jackhammer" "You really feel like you're making a Bugs Bunny cartoon when someone brings the jackhammer." "That is the single broadest joke in the movie." "lt really is." "I'm sure it came from you, Lew." "Like, "Where do we go from here, Lew?"" "And he'd put up his hands and go, "Jackhammer?"" "I believe that" " Well, was it you?" "I think that was Sean." "I think Sean Mannion, the prop master, said:" ""l have a jackhammer."" "I know it was me because I was a bit embarrassed about it." "Okay, it was you, and you blamed Sean." "Yes." "Lew was also pitching that he's wearing one of those exercise belts that shakes your belly." "He loves old contraptions." "So here's another crazy scene which starts out as a real dramatic scene for me, from the inside, as an actor." "Like, you know, a father-son not-being-in-touch- with-your-children kind of scene." "And then it ends up like this, with me not knowing the boy's name." "It's this thing where-- It happens over and over." "John emotionally sucks you into the scene, where what" "When what he's saying is so ridiculous." "And there always is a moment like this." "The epiphany moment in these movies are always pretty hilarious where after 60 years of complete destruction and abuse of everyone around them, they just see the light." "But I'm gonna admit it." "I am always emotionally affected by Dewey reconnecting with his 70 kids here." "Like, as absurd as this-- From the earliest" "From the cuts that I would see while we were still shooting" "They would send it to me as they put it together and I was like" "It moved me." "It's totally absurd." "But it got me every time." "That's the weird thing." "You start trafficking in, like, biopic story arcs and the structure of these kind of stories." "You have to surrender to their power at some point." "You realize the audience wants him to become a better person." "They want him to get in touch with those kids." "You go like, "I'm touched!"" "And here's...." "Here's Dewey and his many, many children which was kind of crazy because we did this in three different locations all the catch." "And we got a system down." "By the third time you're doing that, you know what you're doing." "It's easy." "And fun to do." "And no song we could write could top the spirit of the Partridge Family theme song for this sequence." "That's right." "A lot of very important children in this sequence, also." "But what is the subtext?" "Kids that we all" "I shoved as many kids of our friends and family and crew and everything into this." "My kids are gonna be so pissed when they know there was an opportunity, you know?" "We couldn't afford your kids." "Your kids are gonna be pissed for a lot of reasons, Judd." "And there she is, Darlene at 50." "You can see in the extended version it's a much longer time that she's gone and you've been with...." "You know, you've been married again to Cheryl and...." "I have to say, Jenna had the toughest time wearing this old-age makeup." "This isn't e-- This isn't even the worst of it." "She gets more wattle-y later." "And she really, truly hated it." "Yeah, she was like, "Don't look at me." "Don't look at me."" "And I was like, "Why?"" "She walked on hating it and I thought that it was just gonna be kind of like that's our joke, is that she hates the age makeup." "And then it became clear that she really hated it like she truly did not like walking around like that." "She goes, "You look at me differently when I'm like this."" "But it's kind of like Star Trek age makeup." "I mean, it's really" "It's way out there." "I loved it." "I loved having the old-age makeup on, you know?" "Because at least then l" "Well, you looked incredibly cool." "I mean, she looks great too but, I mean, you look...." "You got a little Hal-Holbrook-at-60 going." "It's a funny thing, which is that this is the" "This is the longest setup for a payoff for a joke ever, when I learn to" "When I recover my sense of smell here." "I mean, how much legwork in the movie did we put in with all those different sense-of-smell jokes to have this very powerful moment?" "There's nothing so moving as seeing someone smell again for the first time." "And to say, "l smelt it." "I smelt it."" "And go straight to the armpit." "Yeah." "And the interesting thing is that one of our DVD producers who works for me, Greg Cohen, who's in the other room right now." "He has no sense of smell which makes the whole thing uncomfortable." "We're enjoying this joke and then every day I'd look over, and there he is, not smelling." "Really?" "I can see him in the next room crying." "He never laughs at this sequence." "He just looks at you like, "Yeah, real fucking funny, guys."" "He's lucky he doesn't have to smell shit." "There's Dewey literally smelling the flowers." "He's now stopped." "He's learned to appreciate life." "But I do think it's so" "The age makeup is so well done." "Like, better than age makeup is almost ever done." "And it adds a really funny dimension to this joke, of the playing-it-from-1 4-to-80 thing because I think that you actually buy this much more than you usually do." "With the Members Only jacket." "I like when you get old and you're out of touch with fashion." "You know what's the funniest aging thing in a movie that we didn't even touch is League of Their Own." "You remember the last scene of League of Their Own?" "Where different actors with" "Looped by the actors from the" "So you have Geena Davis looping some" "Like that was a" "That's one idea we didn't even think to do." "That's like the body-double idea." "That would've been good." "Yeah, it was really fun being the old version of this guy because I could finally slow down a little." "It was actually kind of a physical vacation for me during the filming of the movie, like, to be able to move slower." "This song is so dirty that-- I mean, it's so dirty in the movie." "And the other verses we didn't use are just really too shocking for words." "And when we shot this just the entire crew was just white with shame." "It was really fun to shoot that video, though, actually." "It felt like I had another alternate career I could see for myself there." "allow them to do such a thing with my husband's music?" "This is Simon Helberg playing Dreidel L'Chaim." "He's another member of the...." "Hey, who makes that computer?" "Oh, Sony does, that's right." "I wonder if they're available in stores or online." "Simon is really funny here, though." "Yeah, Simon's amazing." "He came in after the bar was set very high by the previous Hasidic characters in the movie." "Yeah, he" "And he nailed it." "He nailed it." ""Dewey Cox and Lil' Nutzzak." "What a package."" "Yeah." "A much-quoted line." "Yep." "This is one of my favorite oddballs." "Watch, it's John's reading here I love." "This one." "Of course you can rock, sweetheart." "Well, I don't know that I can rock." "The level of seriousness to that." "I've always thought it's so funny." ""l don't know if I can rock." Like he's just" "He's incredibly worried about it and he's yelling at people, and he's...." "John made a funny choice, which is that old Dewey" "And this really is just something that Reilly came up with that is not really in the script which is, old Dewey is kind of a dick to ev" "Like he's just-- He's sort of, like, so grumpy that" "Yeah, he's no longer trying to please people." "He's just at home on the farm." "Members Only jacket." "And it turns out all that hard walking destroyed his knees and hips." "He almost can't walk anymore." "He walked a little too hard, it turned out." "Yeah." "Watch the hip:" "Walk hard" "Hard" "And then we come to one of the more surreal days of shooting when all these real famous people came." "To sing "Walk Hard."" "To sing a fake hit." "Now, there's three legends front and center here." "And right behind them-- So that's Lyle, obviously." "Jewel and Jackson Browne." "Right behind them is Don Was, playing bass." "Right there which I always thought was so funny." "He's a great record producer." "And what's funny about that is that Don actually plays bass at these things all the time." "And, in fact, called us a couple weeks after this and said, like he had just done one." ""l just did the Paul Simon one."" "And I went, "You nailed it."" "Hello." "Oh, he is so cute." "That was really fun with those guys." "For people that are watching the movie for hair this is the one moment in the movie where Dewey actually wears a wig." "Where he says" "That's right." "His Carl Perkins wig." "This is a very sophisticated hair joke which is that bald Dewey returns to the stage and wants to wear a wig." "He gets self-conscious about his appearance." "And here's" " Ghostface Killah could not have been more fun and into this." "This was really kind of like a crazy morning." "I gotta agree with...." "Ghostface kicked it over the top here with the celebrity appearances." "This is when it becomes sublime." "Yeah, just to be able to say their four names together in a sentence always" " We all love that." "Lyle Lovett, Jackson Browne, Jewel and Ghostface Killah." "And Jewel yodeling over Ghostface Killah rapping." "It's just" " It's an amazing hat trick." "I got to write some lyrics with Ghostface that day and I have to say, it was an uncomfortable moment." "Lyle Lovett is one of my heroes." "As is Jackson Browne." "It was really fun." "Jewel was so great." "We had a good time." "It's a medication for erectile dysfunction." "It gives you a boner." "Now, originally, we wanted him to be smoking crack in a really happy way." "Well, originally, we shot crack and it turned out it had a little problem which is something about crack is disturbing." "We're not sure what part of crack, but...." "I don't know what it is." "There's something about the idea that this old man's a crack addict." "I don't know." "It's the same drug in a different form that we've used earlier in the movie." "And yet:" ""No, no." "Not in that form." "Not in the rock form." "That's not funny."" "It's funny in The Wire." "Now, this, I could not be prouder of." "The appearance of the actual Temptations which is, like, a Top Gun joke." "But, man, standing there shooting them doing that..." "But, man, standing there shooting them doing that was an unbelievably cool thing." "I'm so glad that this scene made it into the movie right here because this, to me, is most emblematic of biopics." "There's a conversation in the mirror and then, with the various visions from your life at the end of the movie, this kind of" "This says it all in the biopic world to me." "And this is, like, so complicated." "It's almost amazing we cut it out." "It's, like this is a good day and a half of shooting." "But now it lives." "Look at him in the background." "I know." "My reflection watches." "Reflection becomes a character." "And it's funny when you're shooting a thing like this." "Talking about it on the set and stuff you start to think of the reflection as a different character." "Like, you kind of get absorbed into this reality more than" ""Well, what's he doing?" "What does the reflection think about this?"" "I have, haven't I?" "You sure have." "And there's Pa who is holding an oar." "Because he got killed on a sailboat." "Because he used to get killed on a sailboat." "But now we have a great" "I like to think that there's another reason even when it's just in this symbol." "Because we've all been sailing out in troubled waters?" "Yes, that's exactly right." "That's why he's" "I thought he was canoeing in heaven." "In Wizard of Oz when you go by." "He was just up there canoeing and came down." "Yeah, I like that." "I've always liked that...." "I've learned that I can't spend all my time thinking about Dewey Cox." "And this speech always made me laugh." "It's just, like" " It's the thing you were talking about of, like, trying to extract a message from the movie." "And here, it's just" " It's like he's just got eight convoluted contradicting messages wrapped into one." "It's about the music." "lt always has been." "It always has been." "It always has been." "That was a John Reilly idea and...." "Yeah, my feminine side." "Yeah." "I could not have resisted it more sort of passive-aggressively." "And yet here it is." "And I'm glad it's there." "It's really funny." "I kept saying, like, "Yeah."" "And Vedder." "There's no one cooler than Eddie Vedder." "And he showed up expecting to do about six lines." "We handed him four pages, which is, again, Apatow mind-tricked that we were describing in the beginning of the commentary." ""I'm sure he'll do it." "It's just real quick." "It's written down, he can read it." "I'm sure he'll do four."" "And we handed it to him." "And you actually weren't there for this moment." "And there was a clear look of like:" ""l met Eddie Vedder 30 seconds ago." "I feel like he's a little mad at me."" "And then" "You've taken advantage of him..." "..." "like corporations always do." "And we had a conversation about it." "And he said, "I'm trusting you here."" "And I said, "l promise you, there will be n" "You will never see anything you can't be proud of."" "It turned out not to be an issue because he walked out on-stage and, in one take, read a four-page speech and just ripped it." "Was pitch perfect to my mind, instantly." "And again" "Again, something to behold." "And then we didn't use it." "We didn't let it...." "No way we could've." "Not for lack of performance power." "The full speech is on the DVD." "Yeah." "And this is "Beautiful Ride" by Dan Bern and Mike Viola." "And I just can't overstate the contribution that those guys in particular and the songwriters and music team in particular had on this movie because, to me, it makes the movie." "And there's all this great work by so many people but what I think John and I will both be sort of smiling to ourselves about kind of forever is the time that we spent with those guys making these songs." "And their sense of humor and sensibility you know, is just-- The movie is covered in it." "And this song is a Dan Bern bit of writing that Mike came in, joined him on wrote this incredible chorus." "And it was just, like, that spirit of collaboration and John singing it Mike's massive production Manish and Tom sitting there overseeing, coordinating every aspect of it." "It was a crazy thing." "And this song ends up being, like" "Even though we're making so much fun of everything this song ends up being, like, a real love song to music, you know?" "There's some funny bits in it too, but it also" "I remember" " Yeah." "Love that." "Funny bits like a rubber baby." "Like a rubber baby that Tim kisses." "But Mike Andrews, the producer, turned to me one day and he said:" ""lt really is about just making a little music every day until you die."" "And I thought he was joking at first, then I realized:" ""No, that's true."" "Yeah." "So I don't know." "You invest enough time in anything and you end up putting a little love in it." "Mike Andrews makes a little music every day." "And we definitely" " This part could not have been more fun." "This idea, we just thought it was so funny." "This is a brilliant Lew Morton suggestion which is that we see all the ghosts." "They're digging the show and then someone dies and makes the transition within the course of the song." "So you actually see the guy die and become a ghost." "And Krumholtz does that heart attack so funny." "I like that sentence:" ""Does that heart attack so funny."" "And the orchestra, the choir." "There's Dan Bern playing the organ." "With a truly ridiculous wig." "Yeah." "With a truly ridiculous wig." "We got a lot of the musicians in there every time." "Also, on the hair tip for those doing their hair pass right now I hope that someone's laughing to themselves about the fact that the whole band is bald in exactly the same way." "A strong choice." "Very proud of that, very proud of that." "Except for Dewey, who wore a wig because he's still very proud." "That's right." "Here's maybe the weirdest joke in the movie that no one's ever asked about." "What happened there?" "No one ever says, like, "What is that?"" "A drug trade gone bad..." "...and no kill hits on Parnell." "They had to shoot their way out of it." "And then here is the big sink finale." "The piece de résistance." "He's crying, he's laughing." "He's toasting with the penis." "And that look after the penis always makes me laugh." "Like he's just so proud." "And I actually get choked up when you start flipping back and forth..." "...between the old and the young guy." "That is great." "Uta Briesewitz also needs a little love real quick." "...also needs a little love real quick." "Because she just shot the hell out of this movie." "It's so pretty." "And it's her work." "I've watched the very end of this movie a few times now with test audiences and, I have to say, of all my movies this one gets the biggest laughs during the credits that I've ever been in." "I mean, after this original "Big Daddy" song when you hear Dewey's own amazingly...." "Amazingly" " I wonder what's the word I'm looking for." "Anyway, he predicted how people would feel about his own death and wrote the song "Dewey Cox Died."" "He anticipated his own mortality, his own demise." "You know now that we've been done with this movie for almost two weeks we have the benefit of incredible perspective." "Yeah." "But I will say this was really fun." "This was a crazy ride and a really good time." "A beautiful ride." "Beautiful ride." "Beautiful ride." "Stick around for a little nugget at the end where you get to see the actual Dewey." "I can't believe we actually got this footage of this guy." "Yeah." "We were so lucky." "Yeah, yeah." "lt was right before he died." "Well, right now, this is "Dewey Cox Died," the song." "Any final words, Lew?" "You're probably just happy not to have to get up early anymore." "I am." "That was really traumatizing." "It was very difficult." "That was the longest period of time you had to get up that early?" "That was." "It turns out, when you shoot the movie..." "...you start at 7 a.m." "Yeah." "This was a really physical movie too." "Carey Dietrich's name flying by there." "She and Clayton, you know, sort of ran that production." "The physical part of it that was just really nuts." "Because you got so much music and dancing and people and, you know tons of extras and costumes and animals, you know?" "You got a camel that informs the whole experience." "A lot of people worked so hard on this movie." "John Pritchett did these amazing tracks which is one of the great sound mixers." "So, like, we didn't have to loop anything because it didn't sound good." "And it was really fun." "Standby painter Bill Hoyt." "He was always there if we needed something from tech shop." "Standby painter Bill Hoyt was featured in one of those calendar-section things in the movie theaters for meeting his wife on the set of The Big Chill, my dad's movie." "Really?" "Yeah." "No, I'm sorry." "That's Goldie the painter." "Bill Hoyt I hope to do a calendar-section piece with him someday." "He'll be the star of the sequel." "And right around now, though we can't hear it, I know what's happening." "Around Dan Bern's and Mike Viola's credit is" " The track transitions to "Farmer Glickstein" which is one of the other Dan Bern crazy metaphor songs." "And Dan's demo for this was, like, in the early days of this movie what I would listen to just, like, for fun to remember what I thought was funny about it." "And then John went in and just ripped it." "Judd, what's the main thing you think about?" "If you had to sum up the Walk Hard experience in one phrase right now it would be...." "Well, it would be that tonight I'm going to put on my rock 'n' roll leather and I'm gonna go watch Dewey Cox rock out at the Roxy." "And the surrealness of this..." "...will hit me then." "Yeah, yeah, yeah." "And then" "Let's all wear leather suits tonight." "Nowhere to get it." "Where would you get those suits?" "Lew, are you game?" "I'm in." "Is there a place to get leather suits in L.A.?" "Yeah." "South Paradiso Leather." "South Paradiso Leather." "Well, what city is that in?" "It's in Los Angeles." "It's right near my house." "Really?" "Is there a website for that we could check?" "I don't think there's a website." "There's a MySpace page, though." "Are they gonna have stuff in our size?" "Right off the rack?" "They'll custom-make you outfits." "But we gotta have it for tonight." "Yeah." "Maybe if he works quickly." "The thing about it is that it all fits really tight." "Like almost hard-to-move tight." "Yeah." "Like someone-has-to-help- you-take-the-jacket-off tight." "Good." "They have some used ones." "If you're the same size as the guy from the Psychedelic Furs..." "Hey." "...you'll be fine." "I think I hear the real Dewey Cox." "All right, we'll leave the audience with that." "Good night, everyone." "Good night." "I hope this has been an informative commentary for you." "Yeah, I hope you've learned something about yourself and America." "You did." "It's kind of freaky how much I look like this guy, I have to say." "You really did find the right guy to play this" "It still freaks me out." "There's only one guy." "This legend." "He's a little crossy-eyed." "It's just his nose." "Bye-bye." "Thank you."