Paul Feig: Hollywood's accidental feminist Jul 20th 2013, 05:00
He had a worldwide smash with Bridesmaids, bringing female comedic talent to the fore. Now, back with new movie The Heat, he talks career v family, female James Bonds and the C word
In a pre-Bridesmaids world, the name Paul Feig would have meant little, save to a loyal hardcore of 90s coming-of-age TV fans who saw him as the eminence grise behind Judd Apatow's comic empire. Later, those people would lament (as Feig did himself) his temporary eradication from cult TV history as the co-creator of influential series Freaks And Geeks.
"It was a very … interesting time," he says amiably, with the benefit of 14 years' reflection. "Judd and I were – and still are – very good friends, but the hardest part for me was that we did it together. Freaks And Geeks was my thing, based on my experiences. It was very personal, and we couldn't have done it without each other."
The 1999 show, based on memories of Feig's own teenage trauma, was a hugely enjoyable celebration of disaffected youth and one of the most realistic portrayals of teenage emotions on TV. It was the show that launched the careers of Linda Cardellini, James Franco and Seth Rogen. It also put Apatow – and Apatow alone – firmly on the Hollywood map.
"Right after, he started to take off, and I got written out of history," Feig recalls. It's clear the outcome haunted him for years. "It wasn't his fault, he deserved success, but for about three years it felt like all I was doing was calling newspapers to get them to run corrections on sentences like, 'Judd Apatow, creator of Freaks And Geeks'. All I wanted was my credit. When I saw It's A Wonderful Life, I remember thinking, If I can just make one thing that great and that beloved, I could die happy. And then I did, and I lost it. It was heartbreaking."
After years in TV, directing countless episodes of award-winning shows (The Office, Arrested Development and Mad Men, to name a few), the 50-year-old Feig's heart is well and truly mended. But while he was plugging away on TV, and while Apatow was building a Christopher Guest-style stable with a series of box-office hits, Feig was quietly searching for the right script to propel him on to the big screen too. He found it in 2011's Bridesmaids, a raucously funny and coarse yet sweet comedy that successfully skewered the tired "are women funny?" debate.
Feig, as is clear from both Bridesmaids and his follow-up, The Heat, clearly thinks they are. A self-confessed philogynist and "feminised geek", he recently penned a deliciously satirical article in the Hollywood Reporter entitled Why Men Aren't Funny, in which he gently excoriates the idea once infamously aired by Christopher Hitchens (one of Feig's literary heroes, incidentally) that "Women Aren't Funny". It's a point well argued by Feig, and he's certainly the man to make it. Ever since Bridesmaids made £190m at the global box office, and a wedding dress-clad Maya Rudolph elegantly shat herself in the street, he's been a willing booster for female comedians, arguing that gifted performers such as Kristen Wiig should be carrying big studio films, not forever consigned to the supporting cast.
The man that women are now climbing over each other to work with is a dapper fellow with a cartoonishly wide smile and a neat line in colour co-ordination. When we meet in London, he's wearing a purple bowtie, pink striped shirt and matching socks. Sartorially, it suggests a glut of sisters and female friends growing up. Feig confirms the guesswork. He was born in Michigan to a Christian Scientist in a family of former Jews, which was "just the biggest joke, because there would be my Christian Scientist grandmother criticising my mother, in Yiddish! So I feel like I really am anchored in Jewish comedy." The overwhelmingly affable Feig had a very good relationship with his mother ("Yeah, and thanks so much for asking! I liked my sisters too, OK?!"), survived the obligatory school bullies like any comedian worth his salt, and met Apatow as a wide-eyed nerd plotting an unsteady course through the brutal LA stand-up scene.
"Oh God!" he recalls fondly. "My stand-up was pretty bad. I had this one character, Willard Schmidt, a woodshop teacher who was trying to do stand-up, but he was totally humourless, so instead of jokes he'd tell these horror stories, like, 'We were in the woodshop and one of my students was goofing around and his arm got cut off!' There was always a silence, while people realised that there wasn't actually a joke in there."
Nowadays, awkward silences have been ditched in favour of belly laughs, and in The Heat he's ramped up the one-liners even more. Bridesmaids alumnus Melissa McCarthy and Sandra Bullock star as two law enforcers with enough emotional problems to break the most confident self-help guru. A slow-burner at the start, its sharp wit and some shockingly physical comedy allow the film to hold its own against its elder sister. I tell Feig that I heard several other journalists laughing out loud during the screening, and he looks visibly relieved.
Can I be frank? I was worried The Heat wouldn't be as funny as Bridesmaids.
"Well, how do you think I felt! Every day, I thought, 'Oh God, please let this be good!' There's something wrong with you if you don't have misgivings when you're directing, because your train can get derailed at any point. And when it's going well, that's even more stressful, because you just keep going, 'OK, today's the day I'm going to screw it up.'"
It's certainly not just another female-led film that's centred around finding a man or lamenting not having one. The Heat is very much about the human condition, about two complex professional women finding friendship within their work.
"I find the character motivation of 'getting laid' to be one of the most boring things. I like the idea of two women bonding when it's not about men. It's not a story of 'Oh boy, they took the wrong road, now they gotta find a guy before its too late!' They love what they do, they just have a hard time finding a peer who understands them. And Sandy's character is lonely because she has no friends, not because she has no man. I hate films that imply that people who choose a career 'missed out' on a family. If they didn't choose that, that's cool. Maybe they're busy fighting crime instead."
What made you into such an excellent feminist?
"I come from a family that had eight kids, and six of them were girls. My best friends growing up were girls, and all my male friends are kind of feminised geeks like me, non-aggressive. Men's comedy is so much more aggressive, it's a lot of name-calling and punching. Always with the punching! I never got that. I always think, 'Dude, why are you hitting me?' You can separate men into two categories. Guys who'll have sex in front of each other and guys who won't. And I don't want to hang out with the guy who wants to watch his buddy get a blowjob."
There are some seriously extreme scenes in The Heat. Did you consciously try to one-up the scatological success of Bridesmaids?
"Kind of. You want to create moments that people remember, some sort of comedic spectacle; the thing that makes people go, 'You have to see this movie!' I like those big physical comedy moments. I don't like 'clever' comedy, it's always far too wordy. I love stupid comedy. I am not above a fart joke, by any means."
But do you think there are any taboos left to be broken in comedy?
"A lot of subjects aren't funny, but you can make humour of them. Like the rape joke – I think there are levels at which you can pull it off. One of the best ones I ever heard was Mindy Kaling's character in The Office, when she's about to get into trouble. So to get out of it, she says, 'I was raped!' and then Michael says, 'You can't keep pulling the rape card.' I think that's in the realm of handling it correctly, because it's not making fun of rape. Ultimately, it's all about trust. Do you trust the comedian making the joke?"
Do you mean the sort of "years of friendship" trust that you and Judd have? I bet you two can say anything to each other.
"Yes, we can. But even so, I'm still very sensitive! Anything I think is an attack or a criticism, I am still very much The Artist. It comes from years of bullying. There were two guys in particular, but three in total, and they were all really short and I was very tall. I had a lisp, my nose was big, and bullies tend to pull out things you didn't even know were wrong with you. They're like caricature artists. I didn't even know I had big ears!"
Arrested Development recently made a long-awaited fourth series, with mixed results. Would you ever consider a Freaks And Geeks reunion?
"I don't like reunions, I'm afraid of them. They're very hard to pull off. And often by the time you do them, everyone is so old it's depressing. And to be fair to my cast from Freaks And Geeks, they're all still young and in their prime, and a few of them are big movie stars now. But even so, you just feel like it's going to be disappointing. How can it not be?"
We speed through truly vital topics such as Game Of Thrones ("Addicted"), Buffy ("I love what Whedon does"), upcoming projects ("I want to make a female James Bond movie!"), favourite British comic actors ("Miranda Hart, Sue Perkins and Catherine Tate") and, finally, the biggest taboo of all – the c-word. And it's here that Feig's true filmic aspirations emerge, in a closing monologue that's almost a wistful take on Tom Cruise's "tame the cunt!" tour de force in Magnolia.
"The word 'cunt' can be funny if it's used smartly and discreetly and it's not about genitalia," he says, with something approaching impassioned rhetoric. "I have great sadness that we can't freely say cunt in America. It's seen as the ultimate insult to a woman, and, of course, when used in that context, it really is a tough word. But to call someone a cunt can be really funny. The first time I heard it used that way, I was over at my friend [British actor] Morwenna Banks's house, she was casually telling a story about a guy who was yelling 'cunt' at someone on the street, and I was like, 'Wow, you can just say that?'"
So next on your to-do list is… to reclaim 'cunt'? He grins. "Well, hold on now. I don't think I can just start saying it all over the place. But man, I do want to put cunt into a lot of women's mouths. Oh my God, that sounded terrible, didn't it?"
From a feminised geek in a purple bowtie who wants to make James Bond a woman? Actually, it doesn't sound half bad.
The Heat is out on 31 Jul
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