‘This Is 40’: Judd Apatow and daughter Maude on working together
Filmmakers often incorporate elements of their personal lives into their work, and few more so than Judd Apatow: His three most recent films as a director — 2007’s “Knocked Up,” 2009’s “Funny People” and this year’s “This Is 40” — star his wife, Leslie Mann, and their two daughters, Maude and Iris.
In this clip from the Envelope Screening Series featuring The Times’ Rebecca Keegan, Apatow and Maude talk about how their father-daughter dynamic plays out on set.
“It just feels, like, normal because he’s just a little bit more stern,” Maude says of her father’s directing style. “We have to take it seriously and get it done, and he does a really good job of keeping us on task.”
VIDEO: More Q&As; from the series
“Because I’m a terrible parent, you know,” Apatow jokingly interjects. “And so the set is the only place anyone listens to me.”
At times, Maude says, she found her father’s freewheeling shooting style to be a challenge. “He didn’t let me read the script before,” she recalls. “I mean, he talked about it a lot, and I kind of knew the general idea, but he’d just give me the sides the day of [shooting] and be like, ‘This is what your doing.’ ”
She lets out an exasperated sigh, then laughs and adds, “It was horrible.”
Apatow also opens up about the personal nature of his films, and the anxiety it can bring.
“When we first started showing [‘This Is 40’], I got deeply, deeply embarrassed,” Apatow says. “Even when people loved it, it made me kind of ill, the experience of showing it. Now that so many people have seen it and like it, I’ve acclimated to it. But in the beginning I found it really hard.”
For more from Apatow and Maude, plus a cameo from leading man Paul Rudd, check out the full clip above.
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