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Mike Judge always seems to have something to say with comedy. It could be the misguided youth of Beavis and Butthead or the innocent values of King of the Hill, the mundane workplace of Office Space to our inevitable future in Idiocracy. Extract is about the boss (Jason Bateman) of a vanilla extract plant who gets into trouble when a con artist (Mila Kunis) gets an employee to sue for his injury, and his drug dealing buddy (Ben Affleck) convinces him to hire a gigolo (Dustin Milligan) to seduce his wife (Kristen Wiig).
Crave Online: Is this your least social commentary project? There’s a little but it’s more specific to the characters and this situation.
Mike Judge: That’ll be on the poster, “The least social…” I guess it is. I don’t really think about those things. Yeah, it is kind of specific. Well, it’s based on kind of real characters, and I don't know if that means social. To me, I was just thinking that as far as the setting and the characters, that a factory and these kind of blue collar work places in general have their own unique set of characters the same way that the cubicles do. So I wanted to do something like that. I worked in factory settings a couple times so I wanted to just do another workplace comedy looking at those characters. I’d started writing a couple of the stories, the thing that Mila’s character is in and the thing about the gigolo. Then just decided to set it in this world but from the point of view of the boss this time. I had worked so many jobs, by the time I got into animation, I was pushing 30. I’d already had so many jobs and I was always the employee, never had anybody working for me. Suddenly, when Beavis and Butthead happened, I had 30 to 90 people working for me. I just became very sympathetic to my old bosses. “These people don’t appreciate anything. They take advantage of me.” You try to be a nice boss and that doesn’t work. So I thought it’d be fun, especially with someone like Jason Bateman playing this guy who just has to kind of babysit all these people. Anyway, that’s how it came about.
Crave Online: Is David Koechner’s character of the neighbor who won’t end a conversation based on anyone you knew?
Mike Judge: Yeah, it’s a bit of a compilation but there was this one woman where when my ex-wife and I had this place out here actually, we’d come out in the summer. It was a gated community down by the beach. There was only one way out and this woman would just stop you. She would park herself in the window of your car and she’d just be like blah blah blah blah blah blah. I mean, she single handedly brought down the property value for me by like I don't know, hundreds of thousands, maybe a couple million. She would basically give you a choice of being rude or listening to her for an hour and a half. She was a master at making you think that the conversation was winding down. Stick around for a little bit more, you go okay, okay. “Yeah, and what are you…” I don't know, it was just maddening and I’ve also had people like that just that can’t get off the phone in my life. I wanted to kind of create that experience in a movie. I think there’s something, for some reason, I really like watching those MSNBC prison documentaries. I think partly it might be because I can sit there and go, “Man, I’m glad I’m not in prison.” I think like a horror movie can scare you, you can get a lot of different emotional experiences from a movie so I wanted to create a super annoying character where you just go, “Man, I’m glad I’m not in that car.” That’s kinda how I was looking at it.
Crave Online: What is your fascination with dumb people?
Mike Judge: I’ve been getting that question a lot. I don’t really know. I don’t completely know the answer except I just find them interesting I guess. I feel dumb myself sometimes, even though supposedly I’m not. But I was thinking about that movie Badlands, that Terrence Malick movie which I’ve watched so many times and I just love that movie. I don't know, after like the third or fourth time watching it, I realize like Martin Sheen’s character is just a dumbass. I mean, he’s just really dumb. To me, that’s a lot more interesting to watch that kind of a killer than the guy who’s on his cell phone going, “Okay, you have exactly five minutes or the girl will get it.” And I don’t really know why. I guess it’s just I’ve watched Badlands dozens of times and those action movies with the killer, I’ll watch once in the theater and it’s a good time and then you forget about it. So I don't know. I still haven’t figured that one out.
Crave Online: Is there any hope for American business with those people in the work force?
Mike Judge: I think so. I kind of exaggerated a little bit just for comedy’s sake. I also wanted it to feel like it is possible to have a small company with 75 people and have it work. It’s just not easy. On Beavis and Butthead, I had 30 to 90 people working for me at any given time. We’d have our problems and then you’d work ‘em out. It’s just kind of the way it is. I think that the place we shot it in was a factory about the size, about the number of employees I was imagining. It’s amazing, we just stumbled into this place but the guy is like so close to what I wrote. In fact, if you’re going to make this guy’s life story, you’d get Jason Bateman. He’s about the same age, kinda similar look. The owner was wearing the same kind of clothes wardrobe had put Jason in, same haircut, literally. He started it as a business model in college. I think you can still do that. I think it’s better for everybody than when you have shareholders and a corporate thing off somewhere and you’re disconnected. But the good thing is that employees can go complain to the boss. Then the bad thing is the employees can complain to the boss, depending on how you look at it.
Crave Online: Did the factory you shot in make flavor extract or did you have to redress it from something completely different?
Mike Judge: Not completely different. They basically do bottled water, flavored water, stuff like that so we had to run our bottles through their mechanism and our labels and stuff like that. It’s pretty easy for them to adjust it. I love watching this machinery work. That’s part of the reason I set it in a place like this because it’s just a fun backdrop. But yeah, they make bottled water and like I say, it’s this guy I was really happy to see that what I’d written wasn’t that far off from reality because this guy really is like this guy except for the gigolo stuff, as far as I know.
