Judd Apatow names his favourite comedy movies
Movies like Superbad, Knocked Up, Stepbrothers, Anchorman, Bridesmaids and The 40-Year-Old Virgin aren’t just comedy mainstays; they defined the comedy landscape for over a decade. Though the era of the classic Judd Apatow comedy has long since passed, his movies continue to inform the world’s perception of American humour, just as the films of Richard Curtis continue to inform the world’s understanding of British humour. Here, the director not only names his favourite comedies of all time but also explains how they came to shape his own era-defining filmography.
At the 2007 American Film Insititute Awards, Apatow was asked to name some of his favourite comedies of all time. “I like a lot of the early ’70s comedies,” came his reply. “Like Harold and Maude and things like that, The Last Detail, a lot of Hal Ashby movies. Those are my favourites.”
Harold And Maud is the definition of a cult classic. The film was a complete box-office failure on release in 1971 but has since developed a reputation as one of the most influential comedies of the last 50 years. Apatow has often spoken about his affection for the film, which tells the story of Gordon, a 20-year-old suicide fanatic who falls in love with an 80-year-old eccentric he meets at a funeral. The director even named his daughter Maude, as Superbad actor and writer Seth Rogan would later reveal.
Discussing Ashby’s relevance as a filmmaker back in 2009, Apatow said: “There’s something about those movies, you have a very visceral connection to them, and they haunt you and stay with you forever…He’s the bar [we all aspire to] when we work. You know, we dream that we can make anything as good as those movies, and we ultimately fail every time. Everything I’ve done has been a bad version of one of those, but I’ll keep trying.”
Apatow was also responsible for introducing a young Seth Rogan to Ashby’s film. Explaining how Harold And Maude and The Last Detail – Ashby’s 1973 picture about the friendship between convict Larry Meadows and the detail charged with transporting him to Virginia – influenced his script for Superbad, Rogan said: “Me and Evan, my writing partner, were very against, for no reason, what we considered Hollywood conventions, which I’m sure is a revolutionary thought for a writer. It just seemed that any attempt at emotion, for us, was sellout and stupid and a Hollywood convention… It just didn’t seem like anything I would be interested in as someone who goes to movies.
By that time, Rogan had become aware of the Harold And Maude movie posters hanging on Apatow’s wall and began to think that he should probably watch it at some point. He recalled: “I watched it with Jason Segal, and I just cried like hysterically, like hard crying, like years of crying. But it’s also really, really funny, so I thought, ‘this Hal Ashby guy is really onto something'”.
“We had this script Superbad, and it was just filthy – there was just profanity in it basically,” Rogan continued. “And Judd was imploring us to sort of add some sort of undercurrent of emotion.” Initially, Evan and Seth resisted bringing genuine emotions to the script. “And then we watched The Last Detail and just had our minds blown,” Rogan continued, explaining how the film represented “everything we wanted to achieve in a movie. It was amazing to see someone who could, comedically, do anything I would hope to do and, at the same time, made me cry profusely.”
You can check out the trailer for Harold And Maude below.
