Judd Apatow Talks 'PopStar,' 'Walk Hard,' and the Subconscious Effect Beyoncé Has on His Daughter

Judd Apatow’s record of star-making is flabbergasting. He discovered folks like James Franco, Seth Rogen, and Jason Segel in his early TV favorites Freaks and Geeks and Undeclared. He turned Steve Carell into a household name with The 40-Year-Old Virgin. He helped Lena Dunham transition from indie filmmaker to HBO sensation with Girls, and Amy Schumer go from popular comedian to even more popular hit movie star with Trainwreck.

Apatow wanted an early shot at blowing up Lonely Island, too. The 48-year-old writer-director-producer said he approached the comedy trio’s members — Andy Samberg, Akiva Schaffer, and Jorma Taccone — shortly after they joined Saturday Night Live in 2005 and asked about collaborating on a movie together. The group got so busy on SNL, though, (writing and performing such hugely popular digital shorts as “Motherlover” and “I’m on a Boat”) that the partnership was tabled until they left the weekend staple in 2012.

Their resulting joint effort, the new mockumentary PopStar: Never Stop Never Stopping, is an uproariously funny send-up of chart-toppers. Co-directed by Schaffer and Taccone and written by all three Lonely Islanders, the film follows the rise and fall of singer-rapper Conner4Real (Samberg) after he pulls a J.T. (or Beyoncé) and goes solo, leaving The Style Boyz (a threesome that also includes Schaffer’s Lawrence and Taccone’s Owen) in the dust. In a recent chat with Yahoo Movies, Apatow talked about the three-year process of bringing Lonely Island’s PopStar to the screen, how it his mirrored his experience on the 2005 musical comedy Walk Hard, and, speaking of Bey, the crazy effect she’s had on his teenage daughter.

Related: 5 Things We Learned on the Set of ‘PopStar: Never Stop Never Stopping’

This feels exactly like the movie Lonely Island needed to make. And they do it all: write, direct, star, make music.
And they do so much all so well. They write amazing, funny songs. They are all great performers. They’re unique visual comedy directors. And there’s kind of a funny, absurd spirit to all of their work that is unique to just them. They’re true originals. That’s why it was so much fun to do this with them, and get them all the money and all the bells and whistles to do whatever they wanted to do.

Your desire to make a movie with them dates way back. How long was PopStar actually in the works?
Well, I think we probably started talking about this about three years ago. We basically said, “It’s going to take a year to write the movie, and then a year to write the music, and then we have to rewrite the movie based on the music, and then go shoot it.” So it required a very big commitment. And also the belief that the movie would get made. Because we didn’t know that we were definitely making the movie when they took a year to do nothing but write the movie. So we were just being confident that it would happen, and Universal was very supportive. But the guys would have to come through with a great script, which they did.

Related: Watch Maya Rudolph Make Beautiful Music in Exclusive 'PopStar’ Clip

How active were you on the creative side, both in the script development and the music itself?
I’m not involved in the music at all, other than giving them my opinion on which songs I’m responding to. But I do spend a lot of time with them talking about the story and the emotional aspects of a movie like this. Because in addition to all the funny stuff, it is about a band breaking up and all the hurt feelings and emotions that happen in the aftermath of that. That’s always something I’ve been interested in, just as a fan of music. I always feel bad when, you know, Peter Cetera leaves Chicago, or Sting leaves The Police, or Justin Timberlake leaves 'N Sync. My heart goes out to everybody involved, because I know how difficult that is when you’re so close to people and your careers take you in different directions.

This isn’t your first time dabbling in the musical-comedy world, either, having produced Walk Hard, another film that required tons of original music. Did that experience give you a leg up here?
Well, I did have a lot of experience in knowing how long it takes to create an entire career for a movie, and how long it takes to write the songs, and just production-wise, how complicated it is, to cover so many eras of a fictional person’s career. So it definitely informed my ability to offer them some guidance.

John C. Reilly was just telling me about the musical production elements of Walk Hard – he said you guys wrote and recorded 35 original songs for the movie. So it sounds like the processes were very similar?
Yeah, you have to have all the music done in order to shoot the movie. So it’s very complicated. But it’s also insanely fun to write these kinds of songs. I think the guys had the best time doing it. It was harder for them then on Walk Hard, because on Walk Hard we hired an enormous amount of different people to write the songs or co-write the songs. And with this they wrote all of the songs themselves [laughs]. So it’s a much bigger job.

I’m sure you saw that Don Cheadle (Miles Ahead) and Aaron Sorkin (Steve Jobs) both credited Walk Hard for their efforts to write far more unconventional music biopics. They didn’t want to come off anything like that spoof. We called it “The Walk Hard Effect.”
Oh that’s right, yes. Well, the thing that always made us laugh was about time compression. In a biopic, anybody who walks into a room would have to be an incredibly important person in that person’s life. Like if a woman walked in, he was gonna marry her. There was no time for extraneous scenes.

Or at least have an affair with her and wreck his preexisting marriage.
Exactly.

You guys lined up so many impressive musical cameos in this movie. Did you have any personal favorites?
I got to watch Pink record her part of [the gay-marriage anthem “Equal Rights”] and it really was one of the great musical fan moments I’ve had. Just watching her sing, and seeing how skilled and brilliant she is, and she’s also so nice and funny. It was just a pleasure to be there for.

What is your relationship with pop music these days? As a father of two teenage girls have you been more inundated by Bieber or Macklemore than you would’ve liked?
I hear everything because I have not been allowed to listen to my music for about 18 years. So I’m up on everything. I enjoy it, I go to a lot of the concerts with my kids, and have met a lot of the people. I’m impressed with anybody who’s able to express their journey in whatever art they’re doing it in. So right now it’s 24 hours of [Beyoncé’s] Lemonade and the Drake album [Views]. It’s all we’re listening to. And my daughter is constantly yelling at me, and I realized there’s some Lemonade influence.

Beyoncé is empowering your daughter.
My daughter is not taking any crap from me. She doesn’t even realize it’s from listening to Lemonade 24 hours a day.

What’s been your read on this whole Ghostbusters backlash? What do you make of it?
I don’t think there is a Ghostbusters backlash. I think everyone’s very excited to see the movie. There’s always like 800 angry men who live with their parents in basements somewhere ranting about something, but I think like 99 percent of Earth is just so excited to have a big, pulsey Kristen Wiig-Melissa McCarthy movie. I think it’s a complete non-issue. I think when people see the movie — and I’ve seen a little bit when I visited [writer-director] Paul [Feig] — they’re just gonna be blown away. It’s hysterical and awesome.

Related: Why the 'Ghostbusters’ Trailer Is the Most-Hated Trailer on YouTube

Are you close to directing anything again?
I’m not. I’ve been very busy working on Love, we’re shooting the second season now. We’ve got the last season of Girls we’re shooting now. We’re also shooting a Pete Holmes TV show for HBO, this new show called Crashing about a struggling comic in New York. And then we’re doing Kumail Nanjiani’s movie, which is called The Big Sick, which stars him and Zoe Kazan and Holly Hunter and Ray Romano. So we just have a lot being shot at the moment. But maybe at the end of the summer we’ll see if my brain wakes up and a thought occurs to me. Although I doubt it. I doubt it’s gonna happen. My brain may be mush. But we’ve been focusing on television for the most part right now.

Is there anyone you’d like to spin off out of 40-Year-Old Virgin, in the same vein of what you did with Paul Rudd and Leslie Mann’s characters from Knocked Up for This Is Forty?
I would spin-off everyone from everything. There’s nothing I would enjoy more than Gerry Bednob [Mooj], the boss from the stereo store. I love all these characters, so any time there’s an opportunity to do them again I’d be happy to. I’m sad there’s not more from every one of these people. I’d do a show about Chris O'Dowd from the record company in This Is Forty or Rose Byrne in Bridesmaids. Everyone makes me laugh, and I’m always sad that that’s it for their journey. But that’s because I’m a hoarder.

PopStar: Never Stop Never Stopping opens Friday. Watch the trailer: