In The News
Judd Apatow Interview, Knocked Up
Q: How was your experience working with Cirque Du Soleil?
Judd Apatow: Cirque Du Soleil was fantastic to us. We had this idea. I’d written Cirque Du Soleil into movies before and for one reason or another it never seemed to survive the rewrites and I always knew that there was a great comedy sequence to be done with Cirque Du Soleil and I was frankly very surprised that it hadn’t already been done. There’s very few things that are fresh that are that popular. So when we sent them the pages, they were very, very receptive and they got the joke and were very comfortable with it because it is about guys doing mushrooms at Cirque Du Soleil but it didn’t seem to bother them.
They got the joke and we went to all the shows and tried to figure out which show would look right for the sequence and then when we went there, for an entire day they performed the show just for our cameras and about 900 extras and it really couldn’t have been easier. It’s the kind of thing that you would thing would be incredibly difficult to accomplish, but theirs is just such a well run operation that they made it all easy and I’m really proud of the sequence. It gets really big laughs and I’ve been to all of those shows a billion times and we all went to the Love show the weekend that we shot that sequence. I’ve since been back. I’m very thankful to them. Then later I found out that the woman who was in charge of approving everything babysat me when I was 8 years old (Cheryl Khaner). Isn’t that odd? She was my babysitter, now she’s head of marketing and public relations for Cirque Du Soleil.
Q: Does she remember you?
Judd Apatow: She did, she did due to my childhood antics. I’m sure I created a lot of problems for her then.