Austin Film Festival Interview: Paul Feig, Creator of Freaks and Geeks

We also had this camaraderie of being two guys that had run these shows that were sort of critically acclaimed, but low rated. The whole thing kind of brought us together and I ended up doing seven episodes over the course of three seasons and we just kept in touch. He’s one of my favorite guys.

How much directing experience had you had before? We know that you directed the last episode of Freaks and Geeks.

Yeah. Well I had gone to USC Film School and learned directing there, but just short film capacity. I was an actor for a long time after that. Kept wanting to direct, was sort of afraid to direct a little bit. I was afraid to be in charge. So, finally, cut to the mid-90s, I was doing Sabrina, the Teenage Witch. I was a regular on that show the first season and was desperate to make a movie. During that time, I wrote this small, independent feature and took my money from that first season and put it all into this film I made for 30,000 dollars, and that was the first time I directed something more real. It was a very transformative event, because I was still really nervous about it. Put the whole thing together, was the producer and everything.

I remember two or three days into shooting, I got way behind. We only had 6 days to shoot because we didn’t have any money. And this one day, way behind, I just remember feeling like the pressure was too much, I’m going to have a nervous breakdown. I remember my AD--he had directed before--he was kind of looking to see if I was gonna crack. We were in the middle of this set-up and I remember thinking to myself, “I’m just going to pull the plug right now. Stop. I can’t do it. I think I’m going to lose my mind.” And I had this very distinct moment. I remember going “This is what I’ve always want to do. If I kill this now, I will never do it again because I will put out some reputation that I cracked under pressure.” And it was what I feared for years, that I would do this. So I remember everyone’s staring at me kind of waiting for what we do next and I was like, “You know what what? One second, everybody. Let me just go think about one thing.” So I remember walking away from them--about 20 feet away--just standing there and just being like “I can do this. Just do it. Do it one step at a time.” Suddenly I got this weird blast of confidence, came back, and we were so behind I was like “We’ll do this as one shot. You go over here...” We immediately caught up by restaging this thing as a oner and I suddenly got all this confidence. I remember giving my AD a hard time, “See, we did it” and never looked back. That was such a transformative thing for me.

Then after that, I directed one episode of Undeclared. I hadn’t done that much, so when I came in to Arrested, I really came in sort of green still. The other transformative moment I had was I would over-prepare everything; I would show up to set with shot lists, storyboards and everything. And when I got to Arrested it was the end of their season. They were really behind and so they didn’t have scripts ready in time. I wouldn’t get scripts until the day before we would shoot or something, so it was terrifying. At the same time, something broke me. It made me able to be very spontaneous as a director and be able to get something and immediately process it. That was sort of more film school for me than USC.

Yeah, definitely. That’s impressive. Well, beyond Freaks and Geeks, when we think about shows that were brutally murdered right before our eyes, we think about Winnie Holzman’s My So-Called Life, Daniel Knauf’s Carnivale, and Wonderfalls/Pushing Daisies (Bryan Fuller). What shows would you have liked to see live on a little longer?

Freaks and Geeks, definitely. **Laughs**

Good choice.

No, um, it was more that when I was a kid, there were shows that I loved -- you know, I was in Michigan, there was no Entertainment Tonight and all that stuff; you didn’t know anything about backstage Hollywood. All you knew was the shows that came out. I have more of a memory of being upset about shows from my childhood getting cancelled that we thought were great and only once I got older and moved out to Los Angeles would I hear that the shows that I liked were considered just these disasters that were so terrible and how could they ever put them on TV. Things like Mel Brooks had a show called When Things Were Rotten and I thought was so hilarious and it was like this famous thing for being terrible. And this show called Quark, which was a Sci-Fi comedy starring Richard Benjamin that we just thought was hilarious that’s always held up as being one of the biggest disasters. That taught me a lot because with critics and everything, you read all this critical stuff into it and you think, well, that must not be very good, but at the end of the day what matters is if you connect with the material. So I think about projects that just got killed by the critics and yet audience members...

Like I did this movie Unaccompanied Minors a few years ago, this Christmas movie that just got completely killed. It was a letdown for me; it wasn’t what it was supposed to be, but at the same time I was happy with it. But then I was out on a book tour recently for this kids’ book I wrote. Went to schools and talked about my credits, I mentioned The Office and everybody’s a big fan of that, but I wouldn’t even mention Unaccompanied Minors until a few appearances in. I would kind of just go on “and I did this movie Unaccompanied Minors,” and the kids were like “Ahhhhh!” They all knew it, they all really liked it. And, you know, once they get older, they may watch it again and go like “Ugh, that’s terrible,” but just the fact that it kind of hit the target audience. That’s when you realize that ultimately you’re doing stuff for audiences; you’re doing stuff for people. Hopefully you bring the critics along, but if you can at least entertain the audience the way that you set out to do, even if it’s not highbrow, then you’re doing what you set out to do.

Yeah, we liked your discussion at the panel about the small audiences and actually getting that reaction from them. It does mean something to have that fan--that BIG fan--that’s going crazy about your show.

Yeah! It’s satisfying to reach people who are of a similar mindset as you are or respond to things...you know, ‘cause you do write from your life no matter how fictionalized it is. And so, in a way, when they respond it’s like them saying “Hey, I’ve been through similar experiences in my life and I’m so glad that you’re portraying them realistically.” That’s a very satisfying thing for me.

Austin360 had a quote from you at the Write What You Know: Comedy panel. You had said, “Comedy comes from vulnerability...I like to concentrate on characters who don’t normally get served by Hollywood.” So out of the characters that you have created, who do you think was the most in need of a Hollywood serving?

Oh, well, I mean I think my favorite character I’ve ever created is Lindsay Weir. She’s the only character in that show that was not based on anybody I knew. All the other characters were sort of loosely based on either myself or my friends, or guys I knew in the neighborhood or in school. But Lindsay: I wanted to create this kind of a hero girl character who was in crisis, but who was smarter than everybody else, but who was more vulnerable in a weird way than anybody else and so I think I’m most pleased with her.

And the only thing it was based on, really, is when I was writing the spec pilot for Freaks and Greeks, I was out on this college tour driving around all these places. I was in Wilksbury, Pennsylvania and staying at this hotel. I was hashing out what the show was going to be and went out for a walk and was kinda “I need, like, a sister for this guy” and saw this group of girls walking and smoking. I saw this one girl that was kind of tough, but you could tell she was kind of putting it on, too. She would kinda look back at something. I was, like, “That’s the girl. That’s who I want it to be.”

So flash forward to when we were casting and we were seeing actresses, Linda Cardellini walked in. I always had this mental image I just made up of what this girl would look like and it was Linda. It was this otherworldly moment of “That’s the girl, that’s the girl, that’s the girl!” You know and then she was so great. We went back and forth, and everybody was deciding if she was the right one for it. People were hemming and hawing and then I got a call from my casting directors saying “You’re going to lose this girl. They want her for this other thing.” I remember I was in the bathtub in Toronto between casting and I was on the phone screaming “We got to get her!” Then we made it happen, we made the deal with her and stuff.

Thank God.

Yeah, I know. She’s the greatest.

We find ourselves missing the realism of Freaks and Geeks a lot. Like, even with Veronica Mars, they had started off with her where her friend just died, she was falling asleep in class because she’s trying to solve this mystery and, obviously, she would be a little overworked; suddenly, the network gets involved and she’s making straight A’s and she’s up for this scholarship. It’s just weird having those characters where you can actually have those things you can identify with...

Yeah, it’s sad ‘cause they still get afraid of that stuff. Television and movies--especially television--tend to be fantasy fulfillment...watch someone in a better place than you are and kind of want to be them, which is fine but that’s so covered by everything. I like the very vulnerable characters. I feel the great thing now is how, especially with cable, they’re really trying to do that. To the point where it’s almost a bit of a joke; well, just in the sense of it’s always a person and their addiction, but at the same time that’s great because anything that humanizes a character and makes them more real and vulnerable is fantastic. I personally feel that TV is in a better place than movies overall because there is this realism in the storytelling now and it’s a great time to be in it.

We agree. Ok, so before we move off from the panels--and forgive us if this is too personal--but we feel like we need to know how you watch TV. Like, are you alone and focused with a bag of peanut M&M’s like we are or...

Yeah, no, I’m very **makes focused hand motion** when I watch. It’s funny, my wife likes to kind of talk and, for her, watching a movie or TV show is like a springboard into discussion and I’m...I think it’s just being a writer or director--especially a director--it’s like I have such respect for other people’s work, even if it’s something I’m not particularly enjoying, I want to study because I don’t want to miss anything they did. I just know what goes into it. It’s like every moment is so sweated over. So, yeah, I’m very intense when I watch. At the same time, there’s nothing better than when it transports you out and you’re not thinking about how it was made. But I’m always kind of obsessed with how they’re telling the story. That’s what I’m most obsessed with is how to tell an affective story because I think you never master that. You never know exactly how to do it 100% because it’s such an amorphous thing; it’s constantly changing. But I am in awe of guys who are great storytellers. I think Ron Howard is an amazing storyteller.

As a director, you’ve orchestrated a lot of events for a number of characters. From a fanboy perspective, what were you most excited about seeing on the page and taking to screen?

I think it would have to be Freaks again. The exciting thing about that was that it was so based on my life and just how recreating it realistically...you know, especially when you’re shooting it in Los Angeles, trying to recreate the look of the Midwest. We literally went in to do these camera tests. The sunlight in California is a very distinct looking thing; it didn’t look at all like it does in Michigan. So we shot camera tests outside, going in with Jake Kasdan and Judd...working with the color tone to make it look like the Midwest. Dull it down to take the highlights out of it. I remember when we got the Midwest filter, I was so excited. “Now that looks like how I remember life looking!”

I think the moment I got the most excited when we were doing Freaks and Geeks--for some bizarre reason--was when we had Lindsay get in the car crash. The same thing happened to me when I was growing up. I had this horrible experience where I was in this car with a friend and he distracted me. So I remember when we were shooting, I was giddy with laughter when we did the car crash because there’s some weird thing about recreating this horrible moment from your life. It was so cathartic. It was like therapy. I felt bad. It was such a cruel moment to recreate and take joy in. **Laughs**

Did we also hear you were excited about putting Dungeons and Dragons on the screen?

Oh yeah, oh yeah. I was desperate to portray it. I mean, in general, I was so excited to get to portray “geeks or nerds”. I don’t even like that title for them, honestly. I had a lot of angst about calling the show Freaks and Geeks because I don’t like titling people, but at the same time it just seemed like a neat, clean way to do it. It was to finally get to show them the way I knew them. When you think about before--not that we were so groundbreaking--but before we did it, the nerd was always tape on his glasses, short pants, shirt buttoned up to the top, snorting really loud. There were a couple of kids, I think, like that in our school but they weren’t even nerds; they were sort of these weirdos. Everybody you would call nerds, we were just awkward, normal kids who just hadn’t matured as much as other kids. So it was thrilling to get to show that.

It was great to show Dungeons and Dragons. I also grew up in Michigan where in the 70s, there was this famous case where these kids were playing Dungeons and Dragons in these catacombs and some guy died. It was so villified. Parents were like “Dungeons and Dragons is like Satan worship”...so to be able to rehabilitate this way: this is what it looks like when kids are playing. The cool kid plays with them and it’s not nerdy, it’s kind of fun. So I was thrilled.

You’re a spanner of genres and this is kind of an obligatory question for someone who does a lot in the industry, but you’ve adapted novels, written your own books, directed, acted...is it dizzying or exhilarating to switch mediums?

For me, it’s exhilarating. I think I totally have ADD pretty bad; that’s why it’s even hard for me to do a TV series a little bit because I have so many things I want to do. It’s great doing a TV show, but at the same time, yeah, I love jumping around because I think each one informs the other one. Jumping around keeps you from getting too set in one way. Storytelling is storytelling, but at the same time it’s fun to jump around because you get out of the conventions of one and hopefully bring inspiration from a different type of storytelling or book into a movie and vice a versa...bringing a TV sensibility into a book to help it move faster. I love doing it; I mean, is it the best career move? Probably not because, you know, you want to stay in and keep pounding and pounding at the one to break through, but I’d rather do it this way. In a perfect world, everything would be going great, but I’m happy that I do it.

We didn’t have any idea that you had written that book for...can we say the “pre-teen” genre?

Yeah, yeah.

We were wondering when you found yourself inspired to write Ignatius MacFarland. Is that something you had been planning on doing?

There were two ideas I had for years. One was about when I was twelve...when I was a kid, I was so uncomfortable in my skin and so uncomfortable at school; I had seen Close Encounters and I was obsessed with the idea of aliens that would come down who understood you and would take you away to a better place. I got way into astronomy and I would sit up on my roof with a telescope at night, just waiting for UFO’s. So I always liked the image of that: the kid so desperate to escape that he would do that. At the same time, I’ve always been a big sci-fi geek and a big science head and stuff. I had this thought...what if where we’re sitting right now, on a radio-tuner in this space, if you just went one frequency over right where we are and switched frequencies, there would be a whole other world based on our world. I mean, it was the same materials as our world, but it evolved differently.

It was right around when I saw kids getting so exhilarated about reading again, with Harry Potter stuff and all that. I remember when they released the fourth book or fifth book, going to this midnight event just to watch and the level of excitement the kids had about books was just so exhiliarting...you get so used to thinking kids don’t read anymore. When I was a kid, I was a horrible reader ‘cause I just couldn’t find books that I liked. I had these ideas and I said, “Well, what if I put those two together and I can make it funny; I can try to write the book that I had wished someone had written when I was a kid.” The paperback just came out and I finished the second one that’s coming out next year...

What was that writing experience like compared to Kick Me and Superstud?

It’s fun. Kick Me and Superstud were fun to write because they’re true stories. I could write that while I was writing other scripts. It would almost be like a respite in the middle of scriptwriting since it’s so hard. So that was really fun, but Ignatius was harder--these books are harder--because they are like writing a script. You’re making up a story and I always plot it out before I go. It was as hard as writing a script, but slightly more fun because everything you’re saying...that’s all the audience has is what you are writing, as opposed to a script. It’s almost intimidating because when you’re letting the final one go, it’s like the letters of the alphabet I’m putting in one particular order; this is it. This is the only way it’s going to exist, whatever I finalize here. So it was daunting, but very, very satisfying. Nothing more satisfying than getting a copy of your book, holding it and flipping through it...

Smelling it.

Yeah, exactly. Just keep flipping through it.

Did you do that with the Shout! Factory DVD of Freaks and Geeks when you first got it? Caressing it...

I was pretty impressed with it, yeah. Especially when I put together the yearbook for it. I really kind of micromanaged that. Even all of the fake signatures on the front and back. I did all of those by hand.

**Laughs** Cool.

I just copied handwriting out of my old yearbooks; I was writing with my left hand, right hand. But it was really fun.

Speaking of other genres, you are a master tweeter. How did you perfect the art of the under-140 character status update?

Oh, god, I don’t know if I perfected it, I’ll tell you that. I love it. I think it’s the world’s greatest tool for--especially for anybody that’s into comedy--because I would say it’s the world’s ultimate joke delivery system. In a way, it’s the world of writing in a nutshell. It forces you to be concise. So you have a thought, you put it down, if it’s too long you have to figure out how to condense it; I hate when people do multiple tweets with the dot, dot, dot. Then you’re cheating. There’s something brilliant about it that I just absolutely love. I usually use it to kick start my brain sometimes. I love it. It’s an amazing way to reach people. All writers--especially comedic writers--always carry around a notebook and you write down these thoughts. I had years of these thoughts. I didn’t go back to get them, but you have them and put them away. Instead of that, let me put them on here and they can reach people, people can enjoy them and they get to know me because of it.

That’s how we found out about Ignatius, actually.

Oh, cool. Excellent, excellent. I always have great guilt about promoting stuff on there. I really try not to, but every once and a while I’ll do it.

It didn’t feel like promotion.

Okay, good. I desperately need people to buy the book, because the hardback came out last year and it did terrible.

Well, we’ll tell our people to buy it. I’ll buy it.

**Laughs** Thank you.

So Austin is known for film, but we have one TV claim-to-fame in Friday Night Lights. Can you move here and bring television with you?

**Laughs** It’s very possible. I love working outside Los Angeles. I’m shooting a lot of stuff in New York right now with Nurse Jackie and Bored to Death. I’m always looking to move--especially TV--production out of LA. They’ll kill me for saying that. Just the look of LA is very distinct and, unless you’re doing a show about LA which is cool and maybe you can really take advantage of that. There’s such a texture you get when you shoot outside of LA because, you know, it’s how the world really looks. LA is such a young city and it’s so pre-fab and kind of strip malls all over the place. Kind of desert-y, it’s not like tree-trees and all that. I grew up in the Midwest; I grew up in Michigan. I like the look of green and trees. When I came into Austin and we were driving in from the airport, it’s looks exactly like Michigan. The way things are laid out, the countryside, and the landscaping. There’s a very, very good chance that I’ll be shooting something here.

What’s coming up for you? You have more Office, we're guessing.

Yeah, I’m probably going to do the season finale over there. Now I’m only kind of doing the big episodes. I just did the wedding episode.

Right. Did you get an insane amount of attention after that?

That was nice. That really did get a lot of...a lot of people saw it, which was really exciting for me. The Office runs really well now and there’s a lot of people, like a lot of the producers and the writers are directing now, which is great because they know the show. I was there last year as a producer/director, directing a bunch and then overseeing the transition of a lot of these people to directing, so I would kind of stand behind them and help them out. But now I feel like they’re kind of up and running. And it’s fun for me to change up styles. I love doing the fake documentary style and I have other projects in that similar genre, but it’s really fun for me now to be doing the Nurse Jackie’s and the Bored to Death’s, which are very stylized, more traditional filmmaking. I, again, love jumping around and all that. I don’t like to get too settled in one area because a) you’ll start to develop bad habits and b) you’ll just start to kind of forget how to do the other ones. So, for me, the perfect balance is to go from handheld documentary to very stylized with cranes and dollies and steady-cams and all of that.

Yeah, and you’ve also stopped by a number of other TV shows like Weeds and Mad Men.

Yeah, I’ve been lucky. I get to jump around to a lot of cool shows. I have to credit my agent. I have this amazing TV agent who I’ve been with--Renee Kurtz--for quite a while and she has always steered me to the best shows. She was the one that pushed me to do Arrested Development. She pushed me to do The Office; I didn’t want to do The Office ‘cause it was based on the British one, which I loved. I was like I don’t want to be involved with that. She was like, “You gotta do it. You gotta do it.” She pushed me to Weeds; she pushed me to literally every one of those shows. You know, given my own devices, I’ll sort of go into myself and work on my own projects. But directing for TV--other people’s shows--has been the third step of film school for me because I get to experiment. I get to work with amazing, talented people. Go into the writing rooms and work with these amazing actors: you know, Edie Falco, Steve Carrell, Tina Fey. It’s so mind-blowing and you never stop learning. You never stop learning. The juice I get from that...I love it.

It’s also so hard to get projects going that when people have projects up and going and there’s a directing slot, that means you get to go in with a crew, a cast, and a great script and make a show. It’s the greatest feeling in the world.

Well, in the spirit of They Can Kill You But They Can’t Eat You, we feel like when we turn off the recorder there should be a moment of silence for prepubescent Sam Weir.

**Laughs**

Because he’s possibly our favorite character on television.

Oh, hooray! Excellent. No, I love Sam. Sam was me. Someday...Son of Sam. Who knows!

Well thank you very much for taking time out to talk with Austinist.

**SILENCE FOR PREPUBESCENT SAM WEIR**

In conclusion: if you love Sam Weir and Paul Feig is Sam Weir, does that mean you love Paul Feig? Yes. Yes, it does.