Crave Online: How did you get into being an action hero?

Seth Rogen: We really wanted it to be an action movie. Those are the movies that we love and we're big fans of like Shane Black movies, when we were younger, me and Evan. Die Hard and Paul Verhoven movies, shit like that. So those are the movies that we always wanted to make, Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs, the kind of movies where violence and comedy and characters kind of work together really well and it was a great time. We did hurt ourselves. Franco cracked his face open. McBride cracked the back of his head open. I punched Amber in the face just to get her in the mood for things. "Welcome to the set!" But it was a lot of fun. I loved it.

Crave Online: Is Bro Love the common thread between all your films? How much bro love is there between all of you guys?

Seth Rogen: Mad bro love. Is that the right expression? I think. We get along. I don't know. We're all friends. It's very bonding to beat the crap out of each other. You're very physical and you're in these somewhat homoerotic positions. There's a lot of me on Danny's back. I rode Danny's back for two days. Between takes. So, yeah, it was a nice time.

Crave Online: Where did the idea for the 1930s prologue come from?

Seth Rogen: That was actually the first thing that we ever wrote for the script. It was from a writing book, The Art of Dramatic Writing. They were like, "A thematic introduction will do." We were like, "Hey, good. We can write a scene that has nothing to do with the f*cking movie. We can say that this book told us to." Yeah, I thought it was just funny. I guess the subtle thread is like if weed wasn't illegal then this whole movie wouldn't take place and the government is to blame.

Crave Online: You've been in two action movies this year. This one and Kung Fu Panda.

Seth Rogen: Exactly. I did all my own stunts in both of those movies.

 

Seth Rogen: It's fun to watch this because I'm actually doing it and you can remember all the days of shooting and all the funny stuff that happened. It's fun to watch Kung Fu Panda just to think that some dork in San Francisco has spent 1600 man hours animating my whiskers. I get a kick out of that. I think that's funny for some reason. It's like, "Some guy is in an office right now trying to get the twitch of my wing right." I don't know why, but that I find very amusing.

Crave Online: How much ad libbing is in this film?

Seth Rogen: I'd say that we always kind of to keep it loose. I don't think that any scene is word for word how you'd find it in the script. Some of it was much more loose than others. The last scene with me, Danny and James in the diner there was never even a script for that scene. Usually we write something, but for that scene we literally wrote nothing. We wrote like, "They talk in a diner." We just kind of shot stuff, the scene with Danny and the cake and all of that, most of that is improvised I would say. But you would never know, to me anyway, and that's what is always amazing. Some of the scenes that seem scripted or written are improvised and some of the scenes that are improvised seem scripted. I'd say that nothing is word for word how you would find it in the script. That's always just a blueprint so that people get the point of what we want.

Crave Online: Did you know that Danny was going to do the droopy head thing?

Seth Rogen: No, and honestly that is the funniest part of the whole movie to me. I watched the whole thing just waiting for the part where he slowly droops down. It kills me every time.

Crave Online: Did you base any characters in this movie on your old friends?

Seth Rogen: I'm not answering that question. From what I remember they're literate.

Crave Online: Does Judd Apatow come to the set or help in terms of ideas for writing or in postproduction, anything like that?

Seth Rogen: On this one Judd helped out the most in the pre-production, I would say. He helped a lot with the script, a lot with the emotional story and the relationships in the movie, but again, this is a script we started writing around seven years ago. So it was pretty ready to go by the time that we finally got going. He would show for important scenes. We shot it at the same time as Sarah Marshall and I think that Walk Hard was also at the same time. So he was kind of busy with other stuff for a lot of it. He was mostly helpful in leading up to the movie on this one.

Crave Online: Is it true that you were having trouble getting an R rating for Zack and Miri Make a Porno?

Seth Rogen: It is true. We live in a world where you can disembowel someone in a youth hostel in Romania, but you can't show people having sex. I think it's weird. I don't know what to do about it. I'm taking suggestions, but I mean part of me felt like, "Yeah, lets go for an NC-17 rating." But when I watched it I honestly don't think it deserves it. We've done some dirty stuff and this isn't anything outside of what we've done before, I feel like. I just feel like since the word porno is in the title and that kind of freaks people out, even though it is like the number one industry in the universe. It's weird. I don't know why. To me it's a mystery that you can show these horrific things, but not some sexual stuff which everyone does.

Crave Online: You took Pineapple to Comic Con. Can you walk around there?

Seth Rogan: I can. What's funny is people don't come up to me that often and it drives Jonah crazy. We were just at the MTV Awards and it happened 100 times. We'll be together and everyone comes up to him and no one comes up to me. And it's the greatest thing. I don't know what it is and he went so far as to ask me that. One guy went up right up to him and was like, "Could I take a picture?" He's like, "Why the f*ck, did you not see him? Why didn't you ask him?" He goes, "I don't know, I thought I would ask you."

Crave Online: Maybe you were more incognito?

Seth Rogen: No, that's not it. I don't know. Jonah's shorter, he's a little more accessible.

Crave Online: You and James met as young actors as Freaks and Geeks. Did you bond then?

Seth Rogen: We all hung out. I think at that point in our lives the age gap was a lot more significant. James is a few years older than me. I remember we'd all hang out and order steaks and sandwiches and he'd order like a chicken breast and vegetables and that's when we were like, "This is never going to work." But yeah, we did hang out a lot. We were saying this while we were shooting too, like, "Who would've thought when we were doing Freaks and Geeks that one day we'd get to make a movie?"

Crave Online: What is your take on the Green Hornet?

Seth Rogen: To us it was just kind of this funny notion that when you say The Green Hornet to people, the first thing anyone says is, "Hey, Bruce Lee played Kato in that show." We've always wanted to make this hero/sidekick movie. That was always an unexplored area to us and for years we've actually been trying to write a movie that was about a hero and his sidekick and then when we heard that The Green Hornet movie was up for grabs we though that could be the most perfect way to do this story because he is the only hero whose sidekick is actually more known than he is. We kind of thought that it would be a good way to tell this relationship story and just do a big crazy action movie basically. 

Crave Online: Stephen Chow's name keeps coming up for Kato.

Seth Rogen: It does. He's someone, until you get an official green light, the studio won't spend any money. It's hard to get an actor without any money but he is someone that yeah, we would love to have him. The version of the script that ultimately we've written is a very intense action movie but the relationship between the Green Hornet and Kato, a lot of comedy comes from that. At first actually we weren't even sure going in whether or not we could be more of a Jet Li type of guy who maybe isn't the funniest guy in the world but is physically very impressive or whether it would be more of a Stephen Chow type guy who can do martial arts but also clearly has a sense of humor on him. In the version that we've made, it seems like a Stephen Chow type guy would be more suitable for the role.

Crave Online: Does he rely on Kato for the action or do they share?

Seth Rogen: It's them sharing the action but I would say the story has something to do with them working out their relationship exactly.

Crave Online: What's the hold up?

Seth Rogen: It's more just us finishing a newer draft of the script and kind of the timing that they do with these things. You might hear something soon.

Crave Online: Will you go for another indie director like David Gordon Green?

Seth Rogen: That's the question. What do you think? I don't know. That's the argument. We don't know. We've been meeting with people in both sides of that, in both worlds I would say. That ultimately is the real question. Do you get a guy who does action really well and who's done that before or do you get a guy who's never done action but can bring something unique to that style movie? We don't know yet. Until we get the script out to people, we're kind of letting their response to what we write be the dictator. Some will read it and be more psyched than the other guys and that'll be the guy we go with.

Crave Online: Is generating a script with Evan different now than when you were 13?

Seth Rogen: Yeah, way different. We write in a much nicer environment, I'll tell you that much. Yeah, we've definitely refined our writing process a lot. It's easier every time. Green Hornet, it just flew out of us. It couldn't have been an easier movie to write I would say, probably because we'd been ruminating or marinating on it for almost a year by the time we actually sat down to write the screenplay. Don't tell Sony that. But yeah, it's definitely become a much more refined process. We outline a lot better now and we know where to start with the emotions and the simple kind of relatable story and then build from there as opposed to starting with like, "There's a car chase where a guy's foot goes through the window." It's a lot harder to write a movie starting there and working backwards to find a story. Now we start with the story.

Crave Online: Are you a 9 to 5 writer?

Seth Rogen: Yeah, we are, when possible. I mean, when I'm making a movie, it makes it a little more difficult but yeah, I'll go over to his house and we'll write pretty much from nine to five. Neither of us, we both love writing but we both love sitting on our asses doing nothing more so we do it in a way where we get as much time to do that as humanly possible. We also both have girlfriends so before we would write from 10 to three in the morning. That doesn’t fly.

Crave Online: Was it a long script?

Seth Rogen: It's actually really short. It was 103 pages or something like that. But in rewriting it, it's already up to like 109 pages or something like that but it's still relatively. We like a short script. To us 106 pages is the perfect script length.