BOP Interview: Seth Rogen and Will Reiser Part I
By Ryan Mazie
September 28, 2011
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Inspired by writer-producer Will Reiser’s own experiences after his diagnosis with a rare form of spinal cancer at the age of 25, 50/50 mixes drama with heaping amounts of comedy, in large part due to Seth Rogen’s role as Adam’s motor mouth best friend. Rogen, also serving as a producer, has been friends with Reiser since working with him on HBO’s Da Ali G Show (along with producer Evan Goldberg).
I had the chance to catch up with the hearty-laughing Rogen and the quieter, but just as energetic Reiser on the Boston leg of their PR tour for 50/50. In a roundtable interview, the two talk about balancing comedy and drama, last minute re-writes, finding humor during illness, shooting on a shoestring budget, and (of course) marijuana.
Will, the script is based off of your own experiences with cancer.
Will Reiser: It’s inspired.
Seth Rogen: For legal purposes it is inspired. I can say based. He can’t (laughs).
So how much of it did you have to change for dramatic purposes? I assume you didn’t start dating your therapist.
WR: My therapist at the time was 65, so it was a little different.
SR: (overlapping) It was just the sex. Nothing romantic (laughs). It was very carnal.
WR: But, no, I would say the drama … what [Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s] character goes through, I very much relate to. I definitely had to deal with a lot of dysfunction in my life. Part of it was because of my own inability to talk about it and the pressure I put on people and also the fact that there were so many [friends and family members] in my life who didn’t know how to deal with it and just completely ran away and bailed. I would meet people who said inappropriate things, thinking they were being helpful, but weren’t. Seth and I would go to a party and suddenly it's like the cancer guy walks into a room and everyone gets quiet. It gets strange and you feel alienated, so a lot of that I drew upon for writing it.
SR: But there aren’t many specific scenes that match up to his real life.
50/50 walks a thin line between comedy and tragedy. How true was that in your own experience, Will?
WR: [At 25] I was confronting my own mortality so that’s pretty intense. We are comedy writers. When we were 25, we didn’t really talk about our feelings. We just joked about everything.
SR: Because Will did have a sense of humor [we joked]. And that’s what we wanted to show in the movie. There are millions of people who get sick who don’t become miserable assholes, and that is what we wanted to portray, because Will did still joke around. He wanted to go to bars. He worked. He put on these comedy, variety shows. He still did that and didn’t stop doing that. It kept happening. He didn’t want to sit around and dwell on it all day, and it seemed like every movie about this, all people do is sit around and dwell on it all day. So we thought it would be interesting just to show a movie that felt like what we went through. It was really sad sometimes, but it was also really funny sometimes, it was completely normal sometimes too.
Will, how long did it take for you to find the comedy in your situation after you were diagnosed with cancer?
WR: It was day two (both laugh).
SR: It was in the first couple of days, honestly. I remember him being sick and going out to a bar and trying to think of movie ideas we can make about it.
WR: I think everybody waited. I was the first person to make a joke about it and the fact that I was able to joke about it made everybody feel much more comfortable.
SR: We made a lot of jokes behind your back, first, until we realized we could say them to your face as well (both laugh).
WR: And then they wouldn’t stop.
Did the movie end up being more comedic or dramatic than you expected or did you pretty much nail the tone you were looking for?
WR: I think tonally it is exactly what we wanted.
SR: Yeah! It actually worked better than we could’ve hoped, honestly. There are some sequences that literally at a drop of a hat go from being really funny to really dark. Honestly, if anything, I was surprised how quickly we made those transitions back and forth and how with us the audience was willing to be.
… The first scene [editor Zene Baker] cut together was where Joe’s character eats the weed macaroon and is walking through the hallway super stoned –
WR: To the Bee Gees song (laughs)…
SR: Then it cuts to the next scene where he is throwing up in the middle of the night. I remember looking at that and it was really inspiring, because that was exactly what we were hoping for. It’s funny, it’s weird, and it doesn’t shy away from the subject at all, but at the same time it feels like it will get laughs. And then it just slams into something as brutal as possibly imagined and then it comes back to the next scene where it is funny again. I remember sitting around my parents’ dining room table when we got the DVD of the cut (laughs).
WR: Yeah, we all lived in his parents’ house while in Vancouver where we were shooting, because we made this movie for no money.
SR: It was me, Will, one of the other producers, and my girlfriend, all living in my parents’ house. Yeah, we watched the cut at their dining room table, and I remember we were all really excited that it worked even better than we even hoped.
WR: Yeah, that’s when we got really excited.
A lot of people would contend that a comedy about cancer is off limits, but you guys proved that you can do it in a sensitive way. So is there anything you guys wouldn’t approach comically?
SR: I would never definitively say there is anything off limits. I think if we had not personally experienced this, it would have been really hard to make this movie, if not impossible, probably.
WR: But we wouldn’t have known what was acceptable. Because we lived it and were able to talk about it and make fun of it … we aren’t making fun of cancer or illness, we are making fun of how people deal with it. We are making fun of the dysfunction it creates. So it is more about people.
SR: Any idea can be tackled comically, I think.
WR: Like the Patrick Swayze joke. We aren’t making fun of him; it is just a joke about [Seth’s] character not knowing that Patrick Swayze is dead.
SR: Exactly, it is all about how you approach it. If it feels mean, then yeah, there is a lot of shit that you can’t make comedies about. I always think to Dr. Strangelove, which out of context is not that impressive of a movie. But at that time, people thought that they were going to get fucking nuked at any second, it was probably a pretty intense thing to make a movie about! It would literally be the equivalent of making a terrorist comedy today, which is not something I would ever do, but it’s something they have done – I heard Four Lions is very good. So I think it is all how you approach it and that any subject is [able to be tackled] if you approach it right.