Jordan Hoffman: What do you bring to Judd [Apatow] and what does Judd bring to you?
Paul Feig: We're such a good team because we really do just balance each other out. He’s a master of being able to figure out the moves and what’s missing from a story. To say, “Here’s what we don’t have, here’s what we need. Here’s the heart of this thing right here, what we need to make clear.” I think I’m really good at getting those things and executing them.
Here’s case in point, even though I didn’t take full writing credit on this, a lot of people were involved with it, the scene with the ambiguous genitalia. Mike White, Judd, and all the writers were sitting around the writers room, and they wanted to give Ken (Seth Rogen) a girlfriend, and they were like: what’s the weirdest thing that could happen with Ken’s girlfriend? And Mike White said, “She has a dick.” And they all started cracking up, and okay let’s be serious. Then Judd had this whole thing, “No she should, that would be hilarious, like that would be such a great thing.” And everybody was like, “What?!?” There was almost like an uprising, and I remember people coming up to me being like, “Please don’t let him do this, Please don’t let him do this!” And so I was like, wait, hear it out. He kind of told me what drew him to it, and what made it interesting, and I was like, “ Dig it, let’s take the challenge, let’s do it” John Camden wrote a really great first draft, it was fun to get in there and roll up our sleeves.
Jordan Hoffman: Seth Rogen’s reaction to it was just great.
Paul Feig: The fact that he thinks he’s gay because of it. But Judd is the master of figuring out curveballs, and I think I’m very good at taking curveballs and getting a base hit with it.
Jordan Hoffman: So was Seth Rogen really was just a local Canadian guy that slowly became a central character on the show?
Paul Feig: We did all these open casting calls, we went to Vancouver - we did open ones where anyone who wants to show up, can just show up and do it. He was one of like 10 kids, kids, he was a kid then, he was like 16. The minute he opened his mouth, we were just like, “Holy sh*t.” He was just so funny. So he was always definitely one of the characters, but in my original script, the freaks weren’t very fleshed out. It was Lindsey very fleshed out and Daniel was fleshed out. And then the rest of them were sort of this little Greek chorus that walked around behind them, and then they’re all based on guys I knew, they were amalgamations of guys.
As soon as we got Seth, we knew he was great, and we really wanted to use him all the time, but it was one of these things where we had so many other stories to service, you’ll notice that in the first half of Freaks and Geeks there are certain episodes he’s not in, and I remember getting very frustrated, I was like, “How do we get Seth in the thing?” And he was getting frustrated, and his manager was getting frustrated, but it was not for lack of trying.
Jordan Hoffman: I remember watching the series and when he'd show up more and more it was like, "hey, the guy with the deep voice is in this one!"
Paul Feig: Yeah, but he was basically a series regular, I think a lot of the kids were "7 out of 13" they call it, where you don’t get all the episodes, but it would kill us every time he wasn’t in it, and it would just be like: how do we stick him in? I remember in the Halloween episode, he wasn’t in the Halloween episode from the first drafts I was writing because I was serving the story. I think he was just in the car doing nothing, and it was just like, “Give him more stuff to do, give him more stuff to do!”
