Geek Love

Superbad director Greg Mottola puts his own spin on the Judd Apatow school of emo-raunch filmmaking

A A A Comments (0) By Joshuah Bearman Wednesday, Aug 15 2007

That’s what Bill Hader sings while destroying his own police cruiser. And by the way, I really liked the wildly irresponsible cops as a comedy device. They seemed like freelancers or something, like neighborhood-watch “deputies,” or some kind of volunteer program where you get a badge from the police table at the county fair.

I’d like to hope that the 13-year-old kids who sneak into the movie, or watch it on DVD, will get a kick out of authority figures acting like such retards. And that was the idea, to make the cops regress over time into bigger adolescents than the teenagers.

I also like the Weird Party scene. It’s a hard thing to capture, the Weird Party.

I have to say a lot of thinking went into that. And I hope we got it right. The obvious way to go, especially in comedies, is a scary biker party with guys with tattoos on their necks. And we didn’t want that. We wanted the party to feel more random, and therefore more likely to happen. We made a decision not to make anyone too scary. In the coke room, there’s no one particularly terrifying, but it’s just very clear from the people assembling that Michael Cera’s character is not supposed to be there. There’s also a little bit of wondering built into the whole party scene: Is this how Seth is going to turn out in five years, doing coke and listening to Nugent?