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The title of the new comedy hitting theaters this Friday, 50/50, refers to the survival chances of the main character, Adam (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) from cancer. It also represents the film’s chance of winning over audiences. Making a comedy about cancer seems to be a major red flag in Hollywood. However, deftly tackled, 50/50 succeeds 100%.

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.

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