John Hamburg is short, bald and the writer/director of new comedy I Love You, Man (now playing in cinemas), which stars Paul Rudd and Jason Segel. With the massive success of Meet the Parents, Along Came Polly and Zoolander behind him, Flicks sent investigative reporter Andrew Hedley to ask Hamburg about his new comedy, what he really thinks of Rudd and Segel, and how best to film projectile vomit…
FLICKS: Hi John, thanks for calling.
JOHN HAMBURG: Oh my pleasure. I’m sorry you had to get up so early.
It’s okay, it’s eleven in the morning.
Oh okay, you guys are on different time to Australia?
Yeah, we’re a couple of hours ahead.
Okay, then I don’t feel bad for you at all.
Is there any reason why this movie is set in Los Angeles?
There is. I mean, I’m actually a New Yorker and I spend a lot of time in Los Angeles but my home base is in New York. For me the movie was about a guy who doesn’t have any friends and I felt that Los Angeles is a very spread out city and you can often go days without connecting with another human being. I think there’s sort of a loneliness sometimes that comes with L.A. that I wanted to try to tap into.
So do you take inspiration from your own experiences, your own life, when you write?
Yeah, a lot of my movies and a lot of my comedy comes from my own life. Either direct experiences that I’ve had or things that I’m afraid of, or think about, or fantasize about, or people I know, so there’s definitely… I might not even be aware of it at the time but there’s definitely a lot of things from my actual life that I put into these, sure.
And I guess that’s what makes it work. I mean, for me it was the Paul Rudd character, Peter. I loved how he was so socially awkward around people. When he gets all those words mixed up, and says those stupid things, was that improvised at all?
It was a combination. I mean, definitely the idea was in the script. And then Paul Rudd and I are both fans of awkward humour and characters just not quite getting things right so he definitely improvised a lot of that. He took what I created and ran with it.
John Hamburg (centre) with his two stars.
What’s Paul like in real life?
A very unpleasant individual. No I’m kidding. We’ve been friends for about ten years. We both live in New York and he’s just a lovely guy, I mean he’s very down to earth, very very funny. And he would be… do you guys have Jeopardyover there? The gameshow?
No, not really. But I know of it.
It’s a quiz show. Basically, the fact that he hasn’t been world champion on that is a mystery. He just has a dearth of knowledge about very obscure facts that he would continually wow me with.
And Jason Segel. Is that how you say it? Segel?
Yes, Segel, yeah. Jason’s a great guy. I knew him because I directed a few espisodes of a show called Undeclared. And Jason was on the first episode that I did. And I just thought he was this incredibly unique actor, who was very sweet and very creepy at the same time. That’s kind of his gift, I think.
Do you have your eye on any other comic actors for future projects?
Um. Oh God, you know there’s so many. It’s hard to say. I’d love to work with Jonah Hill someday. He and I have talked about working on something. He plays it so real. And I think Michael Cera is pretty amazing. I’ve never worked with Jack Black. He’s always very, very funny. And then Danny McBride, I think he’s a new guy who’s gonna become quite a big star. He’s in Land Of The Lost. It’s hard to say because there are just so many people. But I certainly tried to put a lot of them into I Love You, Man.
I loved Danny McBride in Pineapple Express.
Oh God, he was amazing in that.
What’s your approach to directing comedy? I’m just thinking about how in old films they used to just have a wide shot and let everything play out in that. How do you do it?
Well, I like to do a few takes on the script, you know, and get the scene going as scripted. And then, depending on the scene, the actors will start improvising, or I’ll call out some ideas to kind of take it in different directions. And then, photographically, I talk a lot with my cameraman. Wide shots are great, because comedy can play in wides, but each scene is different. If you really want the comedy to play out on someone’s face then I’ll go in for a big close-up. But for this movie, because we did do a bunch of improvs, I we tried to shoot both actors at the same time. In close up with two cameras, which a lot of cameramen don’t want to do because they feel it compromises lighting. But I had a great cameraman who was down with that approach. And it helped us a lot in a lot of scenes where there was a lot of improv. You know, you had a camera on each actor so you didn’t have to recreate it each time you did a new take.
Going more into specifics about the movie … how did you shoot the vomit scene?
That was actually done with a lot of CGI. We had kind of a ‘vomit cannon’ that had five cans of minestone soup and it hurled all this fake vomit at Jon Favreau but the set was covered in a green screen. And so we did the scene and then we digitally sort of put the fake vomit into Paul Rudd’s mouth and added the other guys around the table digitally. I pretended like I was directing Iron Manfor one day.
The original Hulk star Lou Ferrigno makes an appearance – what made you put him in the script?
Ha ha! Well, as I said, I set the movie in Los Angeles, and often times in L.A. you encounter celebrities. But I find it funny when you see celebrities not at movie premieres or on movie sets but just like in real life. You know? At the dry cleaner or having a cup of coffee with someone. And I knew that I wanted Paul Rudd’s character to be a Los Angeles real estate agent and it would make sense that he was selling a celebrity’s house as his first big home sale. So for some reason, I have no idea why, the name Lou Ferrigno just popped into my brain. And it went from there to ‘okay, it’d be funny if Jason Segel’s character gets in a fight with this guy to defend his friend’s honour’.
Can I just ask you why you like the band Rush so much? They seem to feature pretty prominently.
Yeah. Well, I got into them first when I was a teenager and I just thought their music was so complicated and there were these drum solos where you could tell the guy was playing on like 48 drums. Their lyrics were about, like, mystical things, fairies, and things like that. I think they also write very catchy songs and the music just stuck with me and when I was trying to think of a band that two guys would bond over, Rush just came into my mind. They’re a very guy-centric band. Rush joked with us. They were like, ‘You don’t know how true this is, you go to our concerts and it’s all men kind of swaying with each other.’
I Love You, Man is now playing in cinemas. Read more on the film or watch the trailer.
