Judd Apatow: The Interview

For the New Yorker, Judd Apatow discusses comedy, kids' books, and why he'll never finish Moby-Dick.

From the piece...

How did you select the pieces for the book?

I worked with Lisa Yadavaia in my office and Chris Monks, who runs the McSweeney’s site. I could be wrong about that. Always assume that there’s a small chance that I am wrong about everything. We worked on searching for pieces for almost a year. And it was really fun to have an excuse to be forced to read way more than I normally would, and to ask people for recommendations. If someone agreed to be in the book, I’d say, “Well, who else should be in the book?” And I would ask people like James Franco, and James Franco would send me a long list of people he likes. And he asked his professor for stories that he likes, and then slowly we whittled it down.

James Franco has really become Hollywood’s man of letters, hasn’t he?

Oh, I love it. I love James Franco. I remember when he was on the set of “Freaks and Geeks” and in between takes he’d be reading Freud and I would think, “Is he actually reading Freud, or is he trying to impress people? Is he actually processing this information?” And he proved that he was not kidding.

So when you decide what to read next, it’s mostly a word-of-mouth thing?

I like to get recommendations from people. If I like a certain author, I pay attention to who’s in their world, and it leads me to something else. If you read Tobias Wolff, it leads you to Raymond Carver which leads you to somebody else and that’s the fun of it for me. Especially if you’re reading short stories. It’s hard to do that with novels, because that would be a slow ride. With short stories, you can do one a day and say, “Well, who does Alice Munro like? Who’s the quote on the back of her book, because that must be one of her friends.” She probably only wants a good writer to say she’s a good writer. That’s the fun connective tissue.