Sick In The Head: Conversations About Life And Comedy Part 40

Spike: Fifteen grand a year, and then I got a raise to eighteen grand a year.

Judd: That's not bad.

Spike: That was amazing, actually. For back then, a kid right out of school? And I loved what I was doing. After a year I thought I was going to stay out here for another year and then go to school next year. And it was halfway through that second year that it dawned on me: Most of the kids getting out of college would love to have the job I had. And I started to realize how much I was learning and that this was kind of- Judd: This was your college.

Spike: This was my college. And I was around all these other really creative writers and photographers and interesting people. I would just watch them, watch how their minds worked, ask them all a million questions, and be inspired by them.

Judd: I had such a similar trajectory, because I came out to college and I knew I couldn't afford it. There was this ticking clock. I only went for a year and a half but I knew from day one that my parents wouldn't be able to afford it. I knew it could end any day. I got a job at school making burritos and I was making a little money trying to do stand-up comedy at night, but it dawned on me that no one in my family was obsessed with figuring out how we were going to pay for it. My whole family was happy when I dropped out. But when I was in high school I wrote for Laugh Factory magazine. And through the magazine I interviewed David Brenner and Henny Youngman and that was my first connection to comedians. Then I was an intern at Comic Relief. When I was in college, they did their first benefit, and I worked it for free. Afterwards, they said, "Do you want to stay on?" They paid me like two hundred dollars a week and then after twothree years I got it up to four hundred dollars a week. I was writing jokes for comics on the side and before I knew it I'm like, Oh my G.o.d, I'm making like eight hundred dollars a week-half from Comic Relief and half just writing jokes. And it was the same thing. I was around people that I could watch.

Spike: From the time I was thirteen, I was so into the BMX and skate world-that was like the comedy world to me-but I kept thinking, That's not a job. You know, I've got to go to college and get a real job. But it was the thing that I loved. Getting to work on the thing that you're always thinking about anyways is like the biggest-that's the goal.

Judd: What did your parents think of you going deep into the BMX world?

Spike: My mom was very encouraging, I think, because she saw how excited I was about it.

Judd: She recognized that sense of fun.

Spike: Yeah, I think so. I think she trusted me. Looking back, I had a point of view about what things meant to me and she saw that. Like if you're told that something should be taken seriously, you should try and figure out why before you take it seriously. I always wanted to know why before I believed something.

Judd: The thing I was thinking when you were talking was when we were young, there was no Internet. When I was interested in a subject-like, oh, I wonder what happened to Lenny Bruce-I would have to go to the library and get out the microfiche. Today, kids are so savvy. All that information is just sitting there. You can look up Martin Scorsese and watch hundreds of interviews with him. But we were really in the f.u.c.king woods. If you wanted to know something, it was hard to find out. Like, I didn't even see a picture of USC before I went there. I didn't visit. There were no photos. Where would you get a photo of it? You'd have to write a letter: "Can you send me a brochure of USC?" My parents didn't even know what I did at school. I filled out all my applications. Like today, if you have a kid, you're there constantly. You're so deep in their lives. But my parents didn't know what the h.e.l.l I was doing, most of the time. Was that what your experience was like?

Spike: Yeah, but my mom was really encouraging in wanting me to work at this BMX shop in Rockville or to go on tour, or letting me move out to California. She was super-supportive of it. But, yeah, I'd be gone for three months on summer tour and she wouldn't know where I was.

Judd: I would never think to do that in a million years. My daughter's sixteen. The idea of s.h.i.+pping her out...But I did the same thing. I would just jump on the train and go to Poughkeepsie to interview Weird Al Yankovic. I didn't know where I was. I used to go to the city by myself all the time when I was fifteen.

Spike: My dad lived in New York so I would go back and forth. I went to school a little bit in New York and, yeah, by the time I was ten, I was wandering around the city by myself all the time.

Judd: That's when the city was dangerous.

Spike: We got mugged in Central Park. I'd get chased on my BMX bike. But also, going back to the idea of-one of the things I got from working in the bike shop and just being a part of skateboarding in general is that everything-and I would have never known this intellectually at the time-but in skateboarding, the city is a playground. The city is for you to reinvent. You're looking at it in a different way than everybody else is. You're looking at handrails in a different way. The things that people might sit on to have lunch, the ledges, you're looking at what you can do, tricks you can do or lines you can do and everything is to be invented.

Judd: Is skateboard culture progressive? Because it seems like there are so many artists that come out of it. Like, I love Mike Mills. There's so many others, too-Templeton and all of the Beautiful Losers artists. Is that part of what they're taking from that culture?

Spike: There's no one way to do skateboarding. It is athletic but it is also really creative. It's a very individual, individual-minded thing. And especially in the eighties or early nineties, when it wasn't that popular. It wasn't on TV. It didn't have the X Games. We didn't have skate parks. You had to go out of your way to be a part of it.

Judd: No tennis player or baseball player has ever directed a good movie. I mean, it is interesting when you think about how many filmmakers and artists come out of skateboard culture and zero come out of football, baseball, tennis, soccer. It's not part of any other sport.

Spike: I think it's-there's a number of things. One is that you're not told how to skate. In other sports, somebody's telling you: "This is the way to do things." There's a discipline to it. In skateboarding, you create your own discipline. You're in a bank parking lot with your friends at night and you keep throwing yourself down a set of stairs trying to land a trick. Your friends are skating, too, and you are all supporting each other, but you keep slamming and getting up because you want that feeling of mastering it and rolling away. There's no coach. Also, and this is in other sports, too, when you're trying to land a trick, the methodology of getting that-it's like this sort of OCD thing, where you're getting closer and closer every time you flick the board. The way you're sort of visualizing your body doing it. I remember being about seventeen or eighteen and there was this kid Matt Hoffman, who is this amazing BMXer. We are great friends and used to travel together and shoot photos a lot. He's probably one of the most notable BMX guys. He invented so much. He was the first guy to ever think of building a mega-ramp and almost killed himself learning to ride it. He told me about the idea of visualizing a trick and he never read it anywhere, he just discovered it. He realized that he had to start picturing in his head what he was going to do because he was inventing stuff that no one had ever done. Once you see somebody else do it, you can do it. But if no one's ever done it before, you don't know it can be done. You have to do it in your head and imagine it can be done.

Judd: That's like thinking you can do a video with a man running on fire that's shot in twelve seconds and then slow it down and that's a video. That's visualizing something that hasn't been done before.

Spike: We never asked permission.

Judd: Studios today are in a weird position because they want to do the thing that will make the most money but they also know that they need innovation and they have to have something new and exciting for the audience to get them into the theaters.

Spike: And they have a fiscal responsibility to the people giving them the money to make movies. I don't want to rail against the studios here, because I'm so fortunate and I have friends that work at the studios and I get to work with them and they are real friends and collaborators. But I see what their jobs are and understand the situation they're in. When I did Where the Wild Things Are, I had so much trouble getting that movie through when I was editing it because it was so not-you know, I think they were expecting a "family film."

Judd: They thought you were going to do The Grinch.

Spike: Yeah, maybe.

Judd: And when did they find out that they weren't getting The Grinch?

Spike: About ten months after we shot, I showed them a rough cut, and that's when they were like, Oh s.h.i.+t. We have to put this in front of an audience right away. I could tell there were things that they were worried about. If somebody's going to give me money to make a movie, I'm going to be very collaborative with them and listen to their concerns, but it's also my job to protect the idea of the film because, without that, we're all lost.

Judd: When you were making it, did you think, like, Oh, if I do this correctly it will connect in some deep way and reach a certain amount of people, or did you think, I have this idea and I'm lucky enough to be able to do it, so let's go?

Spike: I want the studio to make their money back and I want to be able to make movies in the future. And when I'm making a movie, I want to be responsible and listen to the concerns of the people who gave me the money. But at a certain point, I have to put that all out of my mind because it's not the responsibility of that movie. That movie's responsibility is to be true to itself. If I don't get to make another movie, I'll make something else. I'll make a movie for a million dollars. I'll go write a short story. I'll go write a book. I believe that. I mean, if I'm put to the test, I hope it's true. I hope it's not just a romantic idea.

Judd: That approach frees you up to be as creative as possible because you're not completely reliant on Hollywood or the studio system to keep you working.

Spike: With Where the Wild Things Are, there was a point where I was told, during the editing process, that they were worried about what the movie was and the problem was also it was financed by multiple companies, so- Judd: They all wanted their say?

Spike: They were all nervous about- Judd: Isn't that the worst, when you can sense that jobs are on the line? I've made movies and then the next year people have been fired and it's not necessarily because of your movie, but you're definitely a part of what brought down the administration. When we did The Cable Guy, Sony had had a few bad movies in a row and then, suddenly, everybody was gone.

Spike: I feel like even if they're going to lose their jobs they can't possibly care about the movie as much as I do. And they can't possibly go to the lengths that I'll go to protect it. With every film, I'm so grateful that they made my movie and I will extend myself to keep the conversation open and hear their thoughts. But with Wild Things, there was a point where it started to feel abusive. There was a point where I said to somebody at the studio that I was working with, whom I'm actually close friends with now, I was like, "If I came to you and talked to you about your child the way you're talking to me about my movie right now, you wouldn't listen to me. If I came to you and said, 'Man, your kid is f.u.c.ked up. He's a problem child and he is freaking me and everyone out. I think you should put him on medication. You know, he's really a f.u.c.ked-up kid,' you're never going to listen to me because I'm judging your kid and I clearly don't like or get your kid. But if you came to me and said, 'Your kid is really special. I see how special he is. I sat and talked to him the other day and what he was talking about was amazing. But there's a school that might be better for him than the school that he's in right now and I'll go visit it with you if you want...,' that's a different thing. I'll listen to you."

Judd: It takes a long time to find the people who get what you do. The first half of my career, I was always at war with people. We would fight and scream and curse and cry and I was a terror because people didn't understand what I was trying to do. They were so mad at me, like I was letting them down. Because Freaks and Geeks didn't have more viewers or The Ben Stiller Show wasn't beating 60 Minutes. But The Ben Stiller Show was up against 60 Minutes at seven-thirty on a Sunday! It was an edgy sketch show but they, you know, you get into these battles because either they feel you're unimportant or they feel like you're not doing what they want you to do. And then finally you find someone that gets your joke and so you make Superbad and then you say, "Hey, I've got another one. Do you want to do Pineapple Express?" and they say, "Yeah." And suddenly you're in this great rhythm with a studio because they get your tone. They got the joke. With comedy, as soon as you succeed, you have some credibility and then they trust you more. It must be much more extreme with you because you're doing things that are always very new to the studio. You have a track record of succeeding doing something that's completely original, but yet it must also scare them because you are reinventing the wheel every time out.

Spike: We've been lucky for sure. Wild Things was the only one that I've ever gotten in those kinds of fights with because the budget was so much higher. I was on a different playing field because what I wanted to do required a lot more money. And so when you're taking that much money from somebody, there's going to be a danger.

Judd: They do the math: Okay, it cost us a hundred, it needs to gross three hundred.

Spike: And it's a weird movie. Some people find it very sad and strange or dark and that doesn't feel like a "family film."

Judd: It's a remarkable movie, but it's so daring. When I watch it, I think, This feels like it was made in another land.

Spike: There are people who like it and people who don't like it. I don't even know how to judge that kind of thing. I just know it's true to what I set out to make, and it feels dangerous in the way I promised Maurice Sendak it would feel. When I first started talking to him about the movie, it always scared me because I loved the book and I didn't want to f.u.c.k it up and I didn't know what I could possibly add to it. And then I finally had the idea of what I'd add to it, which is: Who are the wild things? And, you know, who are they to Max-they are emotional volatility and emotional wildness in his life-in him and the people he is close to. If I could make a movie that captured what it felt like to be a person at nine years old trying to understand a confusing and sometimes scary world-that was my goal. I remember talking to Maurice about it and saying, "Maurice, I'm a little nervous about what I want to do because this is what it is to me but I know this book is a lot of things to a lot of other people." And he said, "I don't care." He said, "Just promise me that you're not going to pander to children, that you're going to make something dangerous and personal and true to you. If you do that, then you've done the same thing I did when I wrote the book when I was your age. The book was mine and now this movie has to be yours." With his blessing...and not only blessing but his artistic integrity challenging me and pus.h.i.+ng me and inspiring me, I felt like as long as I'm true to the a.s.signments that he gave me, I will have done right by him.

Judd: With a movie like Where the Wild Things Are, you get incredible praise and vicious attacks. How do you keep your center when you have both?

Spike: The thing I'm realizing is that I just don't start to make another movie until I feel clean again from the last one.

Judd: That can mean years in between.

Spike: I took a while after Where the Wild Things Are before I was ready to start again-it was almost a year after we released it before I sat down to write. I had all the notes for it. I had two years of notes for what became Her. But I let myself take time before I sat down to write, until I felt excited to write-excited in that feeling of curiosity and wanting to get into this for myself.

Judd: Because you do get a kind of post-traumatic stress from making these movies.

Spike: It maybe seems obnoxious to say that, but it's true.

Judd: I think it's because you're so vulnerable. You put so much of your heart into it and some people are deeply moved and touched, and other people could give a f.u.c.k. Twitter is a funny expression of that. You can get so much praise and then just someone's just like, "This was forty minutes too long." You know.

Spike: It's like, "Meh." (Laughs) I love that, that you can work on something for three years and somebody will give you just three letters: M-E-H. It makes me think of two things. One of which is, I feel like my job really isn't to know how many people are going to like something. My job is to know what a movie's about to me, and to know that I need to make it. It's somebody else's job to say, "Okay, that budget makes sense or doesn't make sense." Once they gamble on it, that's their gamble and I'm gonna be their partner in it, but we have to support each other. That's how I feel with Megan Ellison. I feel like we are partners. And then the other thing made me think about what you were talking about before, the anxiety of not being able to get another movie made. I don't want to come off as flippant about that. Because it is an anxiety I had, of course. But it's my job to not let that anxiety affect the creative decisions. That's not fair to the movie.

Judd: So you decided to make a movie about a guy who wants to f.u.c.k a computer. Am I going to get to work again? (Laughs) Seriously, though. What do you take from the success of Her? You know, what I notice from a lot of people is that...I feel like, as creative people, we're all on this journey to get comfortable with who we are, to understand who we are, to find a way for our art to express that. And as the years go by, you can see the journey that people take to be themselves and find themselves, whether it's Garry Shandling as a comedian who then does The Garry Shandling Show, which then turns into The Larry Sanders Show. Or Louis C.K. being a comedy writer who works for Conan and does stand-up until he suddenly reveals himself and does Louie.

Spike: I love the story of Louis C.K. I love the story of him finding his voice when he's thirty-five and, like, and a lot of it having to do with his kids, having kids, and- Judd: Just realizing that's interesting. See, I never thought I was interesting. I stopped doing stand-up because I thought, Jim Carrey's interesting. I could write jokes for him. I could work on a movie with him. But my feelings? Not interesting.

Spike: And when did that change?

Judd: My Maurice Sendak moment happened with Warren Zevon. I wrote a movie with Owen Wilson in the late nineties and I went to meet with Warren Zevon about scoring it. I was talking about handing it in to the studio and being anxious about getting their notes. And he looked at me like I was crazy for even getting notes, or wanting notes, or caring about what the notes would say. He's like, "What do you care what they say? That's not what this is about." And then I just clicked in, like: Oh, that's what it is. And then even as something as silly as The 40-Year-Old Virgin perfectly captured my neurosis, how insecure I felt and how much like a freak I felt. You're just hiding in your cubby, afraid to interact with the world. And as soon as I let go, everything went better. The second I made that adjustment, my career took off. But it took me forever to believe, to get my self-esteem out of the gutter enough to think that my story, my thoughts, were interesting. And I felt that when I watched Her, which is such a personal expression of a worldview and how you feel about other people and relations.h.i.+ps. And then the world rewards you because you went all the way. And it leads to success and an Oscar. Do you look at it that way? Like, Wow, I finally did it all alone, I fully committed?

Spike: It's so complicated. There's so many thoughts and feelings I have about all that. One of which is maybe slightly defensive. Which is: I feel like Her is not a radical departure. Maybe it was, I don't know. But to me, it was just the next step like any next step that came before-following what I had to do. But I have to say, I don't think I could've written Her in my twenties. I don't think I could've written screenplays like that in my twenties because I didn't understand everything you're talking about, in terms of exploring yourself through writing. I couldn't even have written the story you wrote to get into college about all the teachers having s.e.x with you. I don't think I knew how to go that raw. I knew how to explore things I was curious about. My daydreams, my fantasies-as I said, I'm a late bloomer. When I think about certain writers, like the Coen Brothers or Paul Thomas Anderson, they came out writing those things so young. That's incredible to me. But I also want to say that most everything I've done feels personal to me. Even the two movies that I did with Charlie [Kaufman] or the music videos-a music video that would start with a song that Bjrk would send me, and I would try to make it my thing. It's all an extension. They are all personal to me, because that's who I was and what I was interested in and trying to explore at that time. Maybe that's a little defensive. But it's a bit of a defensive answer because, you know, I just finished doing a lot of interviews about the movie and that point was made a lot: This is the first thing that wholly came from me. Which is, you know, true in some ways. But Wild Things feels like it came from the same place, to me.

Judd: There's something about being alone in the woods.

Spike: Yeah, so now that I've been defensive, I'll answer your question. I think Wild Things was the beginning of that. And after Wild Things I went and made a few short films that was like, I wanted to sort of exercise that muscle of having an idea that came purely from my own imagination and my confusion and my excitement and wasn't inspired by something else, that was inspired purely by my gut and heart. I was excited by that. I'm excited by giving myself permission to write what's in my daydreams.

Judd: What do you think people took from Her? Like what do people talk to you about when they say they've connected with the movie?

Spike: Um, what...I'm not sure....I think to answer that question honestly makes me anxious because I'm still recovering from six months of talking about that movie. Maybe I'm a bit fried right now since it's still fresh. It took a lot out of me. But to be clear, I'm so grateful for the response it got, the reception it got. And grateful that I get to make movies and that anyone is interested in talking to me about it in the first place. But it's also complicated just because of how much I've had to talk about the movie and- Judd: The experience of making movies is-if you do work that's personal, you're putting yourself out there in a way that people don't understand. They really don't. I made a movie with my family and it was made up, but it did cut to the core of everything we're debating and worried about and thinking about. And it takes years to recover.

Spike: Yeah. I feel ridiculous to complain about it but I'm just giving myself time to recuperate. Making a movie takes so much out of you, but it also gives you so much. When I lock picture-it's like a relations.h.i.+p ending, and there's something bittersweet about it, too. It's a love relations.h.i.+p in one way, in terms of negotiating what you need from it, and what it needs from you. It's also a parent relations.h.i.+p, in that you can't need too much from it. You have to give to it unconditionally and you have to allow it to be who it is-not to put your needs on it. And then you let it go-it graduates high school and you send it off into the world; you've done everything you can do. When I finished Her, I thought, Okay, I've done everything I can do to give this as much love as I could give it and now it's gonna go off and be what it's gonna be. If it gets loved I'll be proud and if it gets hated it'll hurt, but I also know that what I have done with my friends and collaborators will never change. That is what the movie is to me, that's my relations.h.i.+p with my movie...the experience and life I lived with it.

Judd: It's deeply sad that it ends. If I think about anything I've done-when we made Freaks and Geeks and it ended, I thought: How do I keep these people around? How do I keep these ideas around? I never recovered in a lot of ways. I miss making Funny People. I miss going to see Sandler every day and talking about it. It's devastating. I mean, I come from a divorced family. It's devastating that each experience comes to this...instant violent conclusion, and then you're alone again in your room. So many of those ideas went into Her. I'm such a-I'm fascinated by relations.h.i.+ps, self-help, the struggle we all have, and I thought-in the last thirty-five minutes of that movie, you brought so many ideas together in such an elegant way, that are really hard to capture. The idea of loving your ex, even though it doesn't work. And getting to that place where you feel like you understand why it melted down, and it can't work but...It's like an impossible thing to express. I don't think I've ever seen people talk about it in that way. About letting go and what it means.

Spike: I don't know what to say.

Judd: Am I in the ballpark of what you were exploring?

Spike: For sure, for sure. You know, relations.h.i.+ps are so infinitely complicated. And I think that intimacy is equally so....I was trying to write about all of that, trying to write about it in as complicated a way as I knew how at this time in my life. As you said earlier, every day we're in a different mood and see things differently. And our emotions are so completely convincing to us, so I tried to write about all the confusion of that...but also the way we believe things so truly-the way, there's the moment, you know, where Joaquin is talking about how he is never going to feel anything new again. And he believes it so convincingly and then, the next day, he's believing something totally new. And feeling that with complete conviction that that is true, too. Luckily, we have these irrational emotions, emotions that make life large and-it's just not like this series of rational decisions and logic. It's the magic of it and the poetry of life. I don't know. You saying that definitely moves me. When you're talking about the idea of loving your ex, and being able to hold on to that amidst all the other feelings of being heartbroken or sad or missing something that's gone-something dies when a relations.h.i.+p ends. It is a death because that thing that was the two of you together was alive and now it won't be and the only two people who really knew that thing that was alive are the two of you. No one else knows.

Judd: I think about my girlfriend from high school and all of our dreams at the time and I almost...You know, a lot of times I'm tempted to reach out to her but I don't because it's almost, it's so present. It doesn't feel old. It feels brand-new. I'm always afraid to see exes in front of my wife because I feel like she'll know in my face that I'm as devastated today as I was the day that girl broke up with me. Do you think it sometimes takes making a movie-do you feel like you evolve in your personal issues as a result of making a movie like Her?

Spike: Yes, every movie, I'm working stuff out.

Judd: Joaquin Phoenix is so amazing in Her. It's just so tight on him, and he does so many amazing, funny things. And it's so intimate.

Spike: So many times I felt, I just don't want to cut away from this performance. I just want to sit here on this take and be close and feel him.

Judd: In the writers' room on Larry Sanders, we would always have this debate: Would you rather work with someone who is easy and not as good or someone who is a pain in the a.s.s who is a genius? There were writers in that room that would say, "I'll take the easy guy, life's too short." I was always like, "Nah, you've got to go with the genius."

Spike: Or you are really lucky if they're a genius and easy to direct, like Meryl Streep or Rooney Mara. They are easy and amazing and they work in a different way. I don't even understand it. Somehow they are both emotionally in tune, totally real in the smallest moments and completely directable and able to make the smallest or biggest adjustment from take to take.

Judd: It's not pure pain. But some of those pure pain people are remarkable.

Spike: Like Gandolfini. He was so raw. It was so exciting to work with him, but it was intense, too. Scary even, because he would get so upset at himself if he did something that felt false. But what he gave me and that character and the movie was a piece of himself. He breathed his life into the film with all his heart and pain and sensitivity. I loved that man.

Judd: Do you ever think, like, you're like the guy in the BMX shop, for so many people? That they look at you as somebody who doesn't follow the rules and lives in this fully creative world and does things differently, and promotes "newness"?

Spike: I'd be flattered if I was.

Judd: Was Maurice Sendak like that as well?

Spike: For me, for sure. He's a real artist. And to be able to have the kind of friends.h.i.+p and collaboration I had with him was like-you know, a gift for life. He's somebody who's unafraid to be honest in all its messiness. The same thing with Charlie Kaufman. Being friends with Charlie and being able to work with Charlie is hugely inspiring.

Judd: It's like you continue to find that person. When you think of Maurice Sendak, is there a thought or philosophy that immediately comes to mind?

Spike: I met him when I was twenty-six and we worked on a movie that didn't end up happening. And at that point, I really don't think I understood what being an artist meant. He would talk about it often and I would nod. And over the years, we stayed in touch, we stayed close, but it wasn't until the third time he offered me the book that I had the idea I was talking about earlier. I was like thirty-three, and that's when we started working together. And we became close. I just think he was an artist till the day he died. I think now I know what that means in terms of living honestly and creating honestly. Actually, Maurice and Charlie remind me of each other. They're very similar people in terms of their willingness to throw down against anything they think is bulls.h.i.+t. They are not careerists; they are making what they are making because they have to. Out of all the people that have influenced me, those guys are two of the biggest.

Judd: What about something like Jacka.s.s? How do those guys, and that experience, fit into what you're talking about?

Spike: Similarly. I mean, funnily enough, the two guys-so it's me and Johnny Knoxville and Jeff Tremaine that created the show and later the movie, and we are really close, too. I met Knoxville in my early twenties out here in L.A. when we were both figuring out what we were doing. And Jeff I've known since I was twelve. Jeff introduced me to the Ramones, took me to my first hard-core shows in D.C. He was two years older than me. And when he was sixteen, he had a car and we'd build ramps together and skate.

Judd: He sounds like the coolest guy in the world.

Spike: He was cool. Oh, Jeff was cool.

Judd: You're twelve and have a cool fourteen-year-old who showed you all of that stuff. That's a big deal.

Spike: And then I helped Jeff get his first jobs out here. One of them was at the skate magazine where I was working, Big Brother.

Judd: Is that where they did the first Johnny Knoxville getting shot?

Spike: Yeah, it was all through the Big Brother videos. I introduced Knoxville to Jeff. At the time he was doing extra work.

Judd: A professional extra?

Spike: And he also landed a Taco Bell commercial. And he was like, "I got a Taco Bell commercial!" We were all in our mid-twenties and I introduced Jeff to Knoxville and they started doing stuff for the Big Brother videos. And a few years later, it was Jeff who had the idea to take that and make a TV show out of it. It just came out of what we were already doing. It was natural, what made us laugh in skate videos. We thought if we can get twenty minutes on national TV and do whatever we want, we were getting away with murder. We thought it would last eight episodes. And we got an eight-episode order from MTV! That was all we thought we would do. We had no idea anyone would care; we were really just doing it because we thought it was funny. And then as soon as it came out, it just blew up. Knoxville was on the cover of Rolling Stone two months later and we got to make another fourteen episodes. We did the show for a year, twenty-two shows total, and then we canceled the show ourselves, which was unheard of.

Judd: For your own safety?

Spike: No, we did what we wanted to do. We also felt like MTV wasn't really promoting it that much because they were so nervous about it. They were really into it because it was so successful but they were also nervous about it and getting s.h.i.+t for it. And it just felt right to end it. We ended it on a high.

Judd: What was the criticism? That it was bad for our culture?

Spike: I mean, yeah. It was the downfall of Western civilization.

Judd: It wasn't just that it was something that kids have done forever.

Spike: Certain age groups would view it as nihilistic. So anyways, we ended up canceling it. But they didn't want us to cancel it, obviously. So we said, "What if we do a movie as our last episode?" The movie was so fun and we had such a blast doing it.

Judd: What a great fraternity of people that is. The camaraderie of it.

Spike: We've been through life together. We've done so much together now. I've known Jeff for over thirty years. That's crazy. I've known Knoxville for twenty years, and a lot of the guys-we've been through it together. And we have a lot of it on tape, too.

Judd: It may be the funniest thing ever. I remember watching a little bit of it with my daughter-and she was too young to watch it. I was surprised at how dirty it is. But I couldn't resist showing it to her. I don't know if she was nine or ten at the time, but I'd fast-forward past anything bad. The next thing I know, someone's b.a.l.l.s are on the screen and she's laughing as hard as I've ever seen her laugh in my life. I mean it just brings such joy to people. When you watch it, you think: I never laugh this hard. Like, nothing can get me to this place of total hysteria where you fall to pieces laughing. That's a real gift to the world, and it cannot be underestimated.

Spike: We just stumbled on it. I don't think we had any idea.

Judd: It makes you feel like you're fifteen again. The friends.h.i.+p and craziness and that tension before they do crazy things-it's that nervous energy that really brings you back to middle school. In the best possible way.

Spike: That's what it's like when we're out there, feeling it. We are laughing. We are laughing more than anybody else. We just think it's the funniest thing in the world. You can't force that kind of chemistry, and we're very protective of that. We only do it if it feels right. It was fun to do the last one, Bad Grandpa.

Judd: I watched that with my eleven-year-old. I was like, My daughter can handle seeing b.a.l.l.s. When you're watching Bad Grandpa there's a moment where the big, long ball comes out and, as a parent, you think, Okay. It's probably going to go away in a second, so I'm not going to cover her eyes. And then you think, Wait, what's wrong with t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es? Is there anything wrong with seeing a t.e.s.t.i.c.l.e when you're a kid? And then you just say, f.u.c.k it, she's laughing too hard. This was one of the great father-daughter moments, watching this ridiculous movie. I mean, G.o.d, we laughed so hard. I took pictures of her laughing, it felt so momentous.

Spike: That's so sweet.