I talked to Freaks and Geeks creator, Paul Feig, for 45 minutes and the whole time I am thinking I know this voice. Where do I know him from? Then I found a picture of him from when he was on Sabrina, the Teenage Witch and I still couldnt place him. Cut to hours later Im taking a late afternoon nap (Hey I work from home!) My fianc wakes me up and suddenly I raise my hand, snap my fingers and say Hes the skinny counselor from Heavyweights who used to be fat. That movie is very important for a Jewish guy like me. I couldnt believe it but thats the kind of actor Feig was. He appeared in dozens of roles over the years in sitcoms such as Facts of Life and smallish parts in movies like Three O'Clock High and the aforementioned Heavyweights.
But it wasnt until he got behind the camera and created the cult TV series Freaks and Geeks that Feig really came into his own. The best way for me to describe the show is that if you ever grew up in suburb or in a small town you hear literally thousands of stories about the insane kids in town. I grew up on Long Island in a small town called Hewlett which is just like the town in Freaks and Geeks. Everyone in my town heard about the kid who lost control of his car and accidentally drove into the living room of the high school vice principal. Then of course there was the slutty girl that after her boyfriend broke up with her, went and slept with his father. Thats the kind of things that happen to Lindsay played by Linda Cardellini, the former Mathelete who decides to change her life by going and hanging with the pot smokers or freaks in school.
The geeks are represented by Sam Weir, Neal Schweiber and Bill Haverchuck and they seem to be the three parts of Feigs high school mind. They quote Bill Murray, Star Wars, are picked last in gym and always manage to make friends with their crushes.
Feigs brilliantly real show aired on NBC in 1999 but was cancelled by small minded TV executives. But luckily Shout Factory, created by Rhino Records co-founder Richard Foos, with former Rhino executives Bob Emmer and Garson Foos, has been able to cut through all the red tape to bring us the uncut and unchanged 18 episodes of Freaks and Geeks on one DVD set.
Buy the DVD set of Freaks and Geeks here.
Daniel Robert Epstein: What did Shout Factory do that made the DVDs possible?
Paul Feig: They were willing to do all this music licensing that scared off everybody else. Other companies wanted to put them out but they didnt want to clear any of the music. But the last thing I wanted to do was put out something with half the music gone because I would be pissed if I was a fan. Apparently thats happening a lot because other TV shows come out with music missing. That seems like a real rip-off.
DRE: I remember when Get a Life aired on the USA Network they didnt use the REM song Stand for the opening credits.
PF: Yeah that is a big issue to me so I didnt want to do it until we got the music cleared. But Shout Factory and Richard Williams, who worked with them, really dove in and did it. They were able to work these deals. The DVD set is expensive but not as expensive as it could have been.
DRE: I remember reading a while ago that the set was going to be $120.
PF: Well the fan special edition is $120 but it has two extra discs and the yearbook.
DRE: Whats on the extra discs?
PF: There are the table reads from when we first got the cast together, our appearance at the Museum of Television & Radio for the Paley Festival, a bunch of deleted scenes, raw footage, promos and behind the scenes stuff.
DRE: How was watching the episodes and doing the commentary?
PF: It was weird. I hadnt watched the shows in a long time so I had to sit there and force myself to not go I forgot about this. I still do a lot of that like I love this scene. Which are always the worst commentaries in the world. It was really wild though. In one way it felt like no time had past and in another way it felt like watching something from 100 years ago. Youre in such a state when youre making a show where youre just constantly running and you never really get to really enjoy them until you watch it in peace during the final sound mix. I still havent sat down and watched the shows in a nice setting so Im looking forward to doing that.
DRE: Obviously youre a big fan of comedy. You probably have watched dozens of shows that werent popular when they were on TV or in the theatre then developed a cult following. Whats it like having created one of those phenomenoms that people will be watching for a long time?
PF: I have to say that its really cool. You sit around wishing that the show was still on the air but I like it because Im a big fan of British television and thats the way they do it over there. Its six episodes in a season so they dont amass that many shows but they feel like the good ones are really good. Sometimes I think I we did three seasons on British TV with this show. I love having been a part of something that will be around for a while.
DRE: What was the craziest note you ever got from NBC?
PF: Truth be told they werent that bad with us. But the weirdest one we got was this overall note from Garth Ancier, who was the head of programming at the time; he asked if the characters could have more victories. The whole show kind of put him off. One of the first things he said to us was that he went to boarding school and he didnt know anyone like this but everyone else seems to like it so hell give it a shot. We figured that wed be off pretty soon. He was really put off especially by the episode, Girlfriends and Boyfriends, where Sam is finally hanging out with Cindy Sanders and she asks him out on what seems like a date and confesses that she likes a football player and that Sam is just like her sister because she can talk to him. That drove Garth nuts and he said "hes finally out on a date with the cheerleader and she tells him that hes like her sister." I told him that was what the show was. What kind of show would it be if she professed her love for Sam and he had a hot girlfriend?
DRE: I just love that Lindsay is at first in love with Daniel then he totally blows her off. Guys blowing off girls doesnt happen on TV enough.
PF: Yeah that was really fun to do. In real life the one you fall in love with turns out to be a jerk or doesnt care about you. It was fun doing a switcheroo.
DRE: Yeah I said that out loud that it doesnt happen that often and my fianc said it happens all the time. I said On TV!
PF: That was the biggest thing about writing the show. When youre writing you wonder what happens next and everyone goes, this would happen. Then you stop yourself and go Is that what would happen next or is that what would happen on TV? So you ask, what would you really do? It was constantly having to check our reality to make sure we werent recycling old TV shows.
DRE: I went to one of the marathons at the Museum of Television & Radio in New York City. When Martin Starr [Bill Haverchuck] came on during the credit sequence the audience went nuts.
PF: He was such a favorite.
DRE: What do you think was special about that character?
PF: Somebody wrote a review recently that said he was probably the most well adjusted character on the entire show. In a weird way I think thats true because hes a guy who knew what he was but didnt care. He had this weird confidence about him that I think people really respond to. Theres nothing greater than seeing someone who is an outsider and happy with being an outsider. Women would always ask if he was dating anyone because they were in love with him.
DRE: The characters on the show are about ten years older than me. But I was still obsessed with Bill Murray because of his early movies. You are definitely a fan of that period of comedy so what was it like working with Joe Flaherty?
PF: Oh my god, it was unbelievable. I worked with him for an entire season and there still wasnt one time when I was interacting with him and in the back of my head I was going Oh my god, its Joe Flaherty! It was so cool because hes comedy royalty. He would just make everything so funny. There are some bloopers on the DVD where he would crack up the cast. Hes so funny and he is that guy. Hes flustered and funny.
DRE: Did the younger members of the cast even know who he is?
PF: Not a lot of them. To the kids he was just this funny guy. Fortunately Shout Factory is putting out SCTV on DVD later this year.
DRE: How did you get hooked up with Mike White?
PF: When we were interviewing writers he was on Dawsons Creek and miserable. He showed up because he really liked our script. We interviewed him and we were surprised he wanted to work on our show. The other thing is we had the same agency at the time and one thing they sent over was the script for The Good Girl and I thought that was one of the best scripts I ever read. When we were picking writers I didnt want to read spec scripts of other shows which is normally how it works. We got all these Buffy episodes and I had never seen Buffy. I wanted to see how people did with original characters so when you find someone who wrote a great screenplay it was very exciting.
DRE: Do you feel like you ever made mistakes with the show? Not so much with the creating of the show but do you feel like you did or did not contribute to the show not being higher in the ratings.
PF: I did everything I wanted to do with it but that in essence is admitting what I wanted to do with it might have made the show unpopular. I like really real stuff and I like stuff that is not neat and clean. Not stuff that works out in the end. When Garth Ancier asked why dont we have more victories I would say we have victories because after going through these rotten things at the end of the day they are still friends, still have a good attitude about life and their dignity is intact. That to me is a victory. I would do it exactly the same way again but I think I know what I am supposed to do, which is to have bigger victories which means nothing to me.
DRE: I heard this story about John Hughes a few years ago where he went back to his old high school to give a speech. He walked out onstage and he yells All you teachers suck and I hate this school. Then walked out.
PF: [laughs] Thats hysterical.
I didnt have that bad of time in high school. It was just the certain parties that made it terrible like the bullies and such. In my thank yous on the DVD set I do thank the four worst bullies. I wrote that if it wasnt for them the show wouldnt be possible but did you have to be so mean.
DRE: Where are those bullies now?
PF: I dont know but I just hope they dont come after me and beat me up.
DRE: Were you Sam or like all three of the geeks?
PF: I never felt like I was all three of them but more like Sam. I put all my angst that I had back then into Sam. Neil was very confident which I never had and Bill was just the oddball.
DRE: How many emails do you get through your personal website?
PF: We get a lot. It depends on whats going on. In the last three years I still would four or five emails a day about a show that hasnt been on for years.
DRE: Did the show travel overseas?
PF: Yeah we have a lot of fans overseas. Thats currently the controversy on the message boards, how to get the special edition to the people in other countries because legally due to the music clearance we arent allowed to sell them over there but we are working on that.
DRE: A lot of the work Judd Apatow does for TV doesnt seem to stay on the air.
PF: Yes we both seem to have the same sensibility that network TV doesnt seem to like.
DRE: Hes so brilliant. How did you get hooked up with him?
PF: Ive known Judd because we were both standup comedians together. He would send me scripts he was doing and Id give him notes. Then I did this independent film called Life Sold Separately which he saw and really liked. Then he got a deal at DreamWorks and asked me if I ever had something I want to do to send it along.
DRE: It was a very rich deal, I remember reading about it [It was a four-year, exclusive television and first-look film deal. The total value was in the neighborhood of $ 16 million for Apatow will create and run sitcoms, and write, produce and direct features.]
PF: Oh my god yeah. It was a huge deal because it was right after he got off The Larry Sanders Show. I had written Freaks and Geeks as a spec script. When it was done I sent it to Judd and 12 hours later he called back and said he wants DreamWorks to buy it, from there he took it NBC and got the pilot made. He and I have very similar sensibilities.
DRE: How was the casting?
PF: It was hard in that we had to see so many people to weed through all the kids and teenagers. They are actors so they brought things to it. It was all about trying to find real people who would bring a real quality to it. That said when the right person walked in we just knew it. In retrospect it didnt feel that hard but when we were going through it, it was. We didnt find the kid who played Sam until they very last casting session. We were completely freaking out because we couldnt find him. But Lindsay we found in the second session. When Linda walked in it just worked.
DRE: What was it about her?
PF: Everything! Every character in the pilot was loosely based on somebody except for Lindsay. That was someone that was completely invented. She is sort of version of who I am now with all my mid-30s angst. I just had this weird image of what she should look like. When Linda walked in it was the look, the attitude, the voice and everything. It was this really weird moment of me not believing this person existed so I immediately was like Shes the one. While everyone else wanted to keep looking. Lauren Ambrose tested for it too but Linda was the one.
DRE: Im in the process of showing all the episodes to my fianc who had never seen it before and when Linda was sitting in the car with her friends going Lets go do something it was just perfect.
PF: She just looked like the girls from the Midwest. I always liked girls who were really pretty but not pretty in that obvious way and would dress down. She just feels like a Midwestern girl to me.
DRE: Were you a big pot smoker?
PF: No I wasnt. I was such a geek and my dad had instilled in me such a fear of drugs. I knew a lot of freaks because we were friends but I was like Oh my god they smoke pot and Ill go crazy if I smoke pot. When I finally did it was a disaster. It was like Lindsays experience on the show because I freaked out. I got all paranoid.
DRE: When the show was cancelled it was a tough time for you because your mom had just passed as well.
PF: Yeah my mom died then two days later they cancelled the show.
DRE: Did it take you a while for you to get things going again?
PF: Yeah it did. It was a tough and bizarre time. But it was no big surprise we got cancelled. We were literally sitting around waiting for it to happen. Judd was so upset about getting cancelled. My brain couldnt take anymore bad news. The nice thing is that they let us finish all the episodes. It was better than things that have happened to other people I know where youre on set filming and they walk in and pull the plug. Then you just go home. So at least it felt like, I wont say fairness, but it had a natural winddown.
DRE: Then you wrote a book, Kick Me: Adventures in Adolescence, which I read was kind of supposed to be a prequel to Freaks and Geeks.
PF: No it was a book that I had started years and years before. When I wrote the pilot for Freaks and Geeks I actually referred to some of the early chapters. Like the dodgeball episode was right out of the book. I had started the book when I was a standup about 15 years ago. I had told my dad that I was writing this book about when I went to high school. He looked at me and said Why would anyone want to read a book about you going to school? then I just put it away. It was something I had always wanted to finish so when Freaks went down I pulled it out because so many of the stories from Freaks and Geeks are true stories. I figured fans of the show might be interested.
Ironically right about that time I called my agent and asked if he could hook me up with his book agents. Then I called the book agent and she told me that she just had lunch with an editor at Random House who asked if I wanted to do a book. It was definitely weird. So I did the book and if you know the show its fun because you see a lot of references and if you dont know the show its funny because its insane true stories.
DRE: Will you always be mining high school for ideas?
PF: I certainly hope not [laughs]. I desperately want to get away from doing it but that said I really like stuff about that time. I like stuff about people who take stuff seriously and then fall apart and it feels like its the end of the world. You can kind of only get away with that when youre a teenager. If a girl breaks up with you, you fall apart and go into this funk, thats ok when youre a teenager. If you do that in your 30s people just think youre weird. Thats one of the reasons I will always have fun writing younger stuff, not that I always will do it. But its a fun place to explore emotions at their rawest and get away with it.
DRE: In ten years will someone be doing a show about the 90s?
PF: Totally. I remember even when I was younger, I had just gotten out of high school and I had just missed watching The Incredible Hulk on TV. All the people who were younger than me watched the show and I remember thinking When they get older they are going to be thinking about The Hulk the way I think about The Brady Bunch.
Years into the future, I got so depressed the other day because I was watching VH1 where they talk about each year from the 80s. Its a funny show and I was digging it. They were on 1986 and I knew all the references because I was a standup then they got to this one section about Inspector Gadget and all these people were talking about it religiously and I felt so old so I turned off the TV.
DRE: You worked as an actor for so long before Freaks and Geeks.
PF: Yes I was a regular on five TV shows and I was in a bunch of movies.
DRE: When did you start doing your own material?
PF: It was with the film Life Sold Separately. I went to USC Film School to be a filmmaker but I also thought it would help me as an actor. But then I became a standup comedian which is like being your own director/writer/producer. Once I was in my early 30s I had to make the transition and start doing stuff. I was always writing scripts and whenever I was on a show I would write an episode but it would get cancelled before it could be produced. Before Life Sold Separately I had written this script called Deaf Julie and the Drifter. I shot a scene out of it to get funding. It almost got off the ground then it fell apart. Because of that I had to write something for myself so thats I why I wrote Life Sold Separately because it could be shot for like $30,000. At the time I was also a regular on Sabrina, the Teenage Witch. I thought it was great because I was on a hit TV show and I was going to be rich. So I took all my money from the first season and made Life Sold Separately. Then when I finished it they called me and said they werent bringing me back for the next season.
DRE: How is your last name pronounced?
PF: Its pronounced Feeg.
DRE: Do you freak out when people say Paul Fag?
PF: Yeah and it happens all the time. They get into this weird middle ground where they say Paul Faag. It just happened yesterday when someone called me. When I was a kid I always wanted to change the spelling of my name to Feeg but I never did. Ironically the German pronunciation is Fige.
DRE: Is that how you came up with Sam Weir because Weir goes so easily to queer?
PF: Yeah I wanted him to have a TV safe version we could do it. Because your name turned into something else is such a big part of childhood.
DRE: Do you have a favorite episode?
PF: The standard answer is that I love them all. I really love Tests and Breasts because the way it ends is nothing like Ive ever seen before. Nothing is resolved and Lindsay realizes she is screwed because she got conned by Daniel so all she can do is start laughing.
DRE: What are you doing now?
PF: I did just direct a couple of episodes of Arrested Development. One of our producers from Freaks and Geeks is the line producer on that show. Its such a funny cast. That is the only TV Ive done besides directing an episode of Undeclared.
DRE: Did your independent movie, I Am David, get picked up for distribution?
PF: Yes Lions Gate is releasing it in October. Its got half the cast of The Passion [of the Christ] which is not anything I planned. I did my movie and my Italian casting director went off and did The Passion. Even my Bulgarian actor played Pontius Pilate.
DRE: Youre Jewish arent you?
PF: Yes so you could only imagine how thrilled I am to be so tied to The Passion. Its really awful. It makes me sick to my stomach.
Originally Artisan had bought the movie and were going to put it out at the beginning of this year but then Lions Gate bought them and wanted six months to regroup. We had won a bunch of film festivals at the end of last year.
DRE: Youre going to get asked a lot about The Passion when you start promoting this movie.
PF: I know and I havent even seen it. I havent even seen Kill Bill because I dont like bloody movies. For no moralistic reasons but I just get ill when I see all that blood.
DRE: Do you have any kids?
PF: No kids, just two dogs. I like to say I hire my kids and work with them then I send them home with their parents at the end of the day. I can barely take care of myself.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
But it wasnt until he got behind the camera and created the cult TV series Freaks and Geeks that Feig really came into his own. The best way for me to describe the show is that if you ever grew up in suburb or in a small town you hear literally thousands of stories about the insane kids in town. I grew up on Long Island in a small town called Hewlett which is just like the town in Freaks and Geeks. Everyone in my town heard about the kid who lost control of his car and accidentally drove into the living room of the high school vice principal. Then of course there was the slutty girl that after her boyfriend broke up with her, went and slept with his father. Thats the kind of things that happen to Lindsay played by Linda Cardellini, the former Mathelete who decides to change her life by going and hanging with the pot smokers or freaks in school.
The geeks are represented by Sam Weir, Neal Schweiber and Bill Haverchuck and they seem to be the three parts of Feigs high school mind. They quote Bill Murray, Star Wars, are picked last in gym and always manage to make friends with their crushes.
Feigs brilliantly real show aired on NBC in 1999 but was cancelled by small minded TV executives. But luckily Shout Factory, created by Rhino Records co-founder Richard Foos, with former Rhino executives Bob Emmer and Garson Foos, has been able to cut through all the red tape to bring us the uncut and unchanged 18 episodes of Freaks and Geeks on one DVD set.
Buy the DVD set of Freaks and Geeks here.
Daniel Robert Epstein: What did Shout Factory do that made the DVDs possible?
Paul Feig: They were willing to do all this music licensing that scared off everybody else. Other companies wanted to put them out but they didnt want to clear any of the music. But the last thing I wanted to do was put out something with half the music gone because I would be pissed if I was a fan. Apparently thats happening a lot because other TV shows come out with music missing. That seems like a real rip-off.
DRE: I remember when Get a Life aired on the USA Network they didnt use the REM song Stand for the opening credits.
PF: Yeah that is a big issue to me so I didnt want to do it until we got the music cleared. But Shout Factory and Richard Williams, who worked with them, really dove in and did it. They were able to work these deals. The DVD set is expensive but not as expensive as it could have been.
DRE: I remember reading a while ago that the set was going to be $120.
PF: Well the fan special edition is $120 but it has two extra discs and the yearbook.
DRE: Whats on the extra discs?
PF: There are the table reads from when we first got the cast together, our appearance at the Museum of Television & Radio for the Paley Festival, a bunch of deleted scenes, raw footage, promos and behind the scenes stuff.
DRE: How was watching the episodes and doing the commentary?
PF: It was weird. I hadnt watched the shows in a long time so I had to sit there and force myself to not go I forgot about this. I still do a lot of that like I love this scene. Which are always the worst commentaries in the world. It was really wild though. In one way it felt like no time had past and in another way it felt like watching something from 100 years ago. Youre in such a state when youre making a show where youre just constantly running and you never really get to really enjoy them until you watch it in peace during the final sound mix. I still havent sat down and watched the shows in a nice setting so Im looking forward to doing that.
DRE: Obviously youre a big fan of comedy. You probably have watched dozens of shows that werent popular when they were on TV or in the theatre then developed a cult following. Whats it like having created one of those phenomenoms that people will be watching for a long time?
PF: I have to say that its really cool. You sit around wishing that the show was still on the air but I like it because Im a big fan of British television and thats the way they do it over there. Its six episodes in a season so they dont amass that many shows but they feel like the good ones are really good. Sometimes I think I we did three seasons on British TV with this show. I love having been a part of something that will be around for a while.
DRE: What was the craziest note you ever got from NBC?
PF: Truth be told they werent that bad with us. But the weirdest one we got was this overall note from Garth Ancier, who was the head of programming at the time; he asked if the characters could have more victories. The whole show kind of put him off. One of the first things he said to us was that he went to boarding school and he didnt know anyone like this but everyone else seems to like it so hell give it a shot. We figured that wed be off pretty soon. He was really put off especially by the episode, Girlfriends and Boyfriends, where Sam is finally hanging out with Cindy Sanders and she asks him out on what seems like a date and confesses that she likes a football player and that Sam is just like her sister because she can talk to him. That drove Garth nuts and he said "hes finally out on a date with the cheerleader and she tells him that hes like her sister." I told him that was what the show was. What kind of show would it be if she professed her love for Sam and he had a hot girlfriend?
DRE: I just love that Lindsay is at first in love with Daniel then he totally blows her off. Guys blowing off girls doesnt happen on TV enough.
PF: Yeah that was really fun to do. In real life the one you fall in love with turns out to be a jerk or doesnt care about you. It was fun doing a switcheroo.
DRE: Yeah I said that out loud that it doesnt happen that often and my fianc said it happens all the time. I said On TV!
PF: That was the biggest thing about writing the show. When youre writing you wonder what happens next and everyone goes, this would happen. Then you stop yourself and go Is that what would happen next or is that what would happen on TV? So you ask, what would you really do? It was constantly having to check our reality to make sure we werent recycling old TV shows.
DRE: I went to one of the marathons at the Museum of Television & Radio in New York City. When Martin Starr [Bill Haverchuck] came on during the credit sequence the audience went nuts.
PF: He was such a favorite.
DRE: What do you think was special about that character?
PF: Somebody wrote a review recently that said he was probably the most well adjusted character on the entire show. In a weird way I think thats true because hes a guy who knew what he was but didnt care. He had this weird confidence about him that I think people really respond to. Theres nothing greater than seeing someone who is an outsider and happy with being an outsider. Women would always ask if he was dating anyone because they were in love with him.
DRE: The characters on the show are about ten years older than me. But I was still obsessed with Bill Murray because of his early movies. You are definitely a fan of that period of comedy so what was it like working with Joe Flaherty?
PF: Oh my god, it was unbelievable. I worked with him for an entire season and there still wasnt one time when I was interacting with him and in the back of my head I was going Oh my god, its Joe Flaherty! It was so cool because hes comedy royalty. He would just make everything so funny. There are some bloopers on the DVD where he would crack up the cast. Hes so funny and he is that guy. Hes flustered and funny.
DRE: Did the younger members of the cast even know who he is?
PF: Not a lot of them. To the kids he was just this funny guy. Fortunately Shout Factory is putting out SCTV on DVD later this year.
DRE: How did you get hooked up with Mike White?
PF: When we were interviewing writers he was on Dawsons Creek and miserable. He showed up because he really liked our script. We interviewed him and we were surprised he wanted to work on our show. The other thing is we had the same agency at the time and one thing they sent over was the script for The Good Girl and I thought that was one of the best scripts I ever read. When we were picking writers I didnt want to read spec scripts of other shows which is normally how it works. We got all these Buffy episodes and I had never seen Buffy. I wanted to see how people did with original characters so when you find someone who wrote a great screenplay it was very exciting.
DRE: Do you feel like you ever made mistakes with the show? Not so much with the creating of the show but do you feel like you did or did not contribute to the show not being higher in the ratings.
PF: I did everything I wanted to do with it but that in essence is admitting what I wanted to do with it might have made the show unpopular. I like really real stuff and I like stuff that is not neat and clean. Not stuff that works out in the end. When Garth Ancier asked why dont we have more victories I would say we have victories because after going through these rotten things at the end of the day they are still friends, still have a good attitude about life and their dignity is intact. That to me is a victory. I would do it exactly the same way again but I think I know what I am supposed to do, which is to have bigger victories which means nothing to me.
DRE: I heard this story about John Hughes a few years ago where he went back to his old high school to give a speech. He walked out onstage and he yells All you teachers suck and I hate this school. Then walked out.
PF: [laughs] Thats hysterical.
I didnt have that bad of time in high school. It was just the certain parties that made it terrible like the bullies and such. In my thank yous on the DVD set I do thank the four worst bullies. I wrote that if it wasnt for them the show wouldnt be possible but did you have to be so mean.
DRE: Where are those bullies now?
PF: I dont know but I just hope they dont come after me and beat me up.
DRE: Were you Sam or like all three of the geeks?
PF: I never felt like I was all three of them but more like Sam. I put all my angst that I had back then into Sam. Neil was very confident which I never had and Bill was just the oddball.
DRE: How many emails do you get through your personal website?
PF: We get a lot. It depends on whats going on. In the last three years I still would four or five emails a day about a show that hasnt been on for years.
DRE: Did the show travel overseas?
PF: Yeah we have a lot of fans overseas. Thats currently the controversy on the message boards, how to get the special edition to the people in other countries because legally due to the music clearance we arent allowed to sell them over there but we are working on that.
DRE: A lot of the work Judd Apatow does for TV doesnt seem to stay on the air.
PF: Yes we both seem to have the same sensibility that network TV doesnt seem to like.
DRE: Hes so brilliant. How did you get hooked up with him?
PF: Ive known Judd because we were both standup comedians together. He would send me scripts he was doing and Id give him notes. Then I did this independent film called Life Sold Separately which he saw and really liked. Then he got a deal at DreamWorks and asked me if I ever had something I want to do to send it along.
DRE: It was a very rich deal, I remember reading about it [It was a four-year, exclusive television and first-look film deal. The total value was in the neighborhood of $ 16 million for Apatow will create and run sitcoms, and write, produce and direct features.]
PF: Oh my god yeah. It was a huge deal because it was right after he got off The Larry Sanders Show. I had written Freaks and Geeks as a spec script. When it was done I sent it to Judd and 12 hours later he called back and said he wants DreamWorks to buy it, from there he took it NBC and got the pilot made. He and I have very similar sensibilities.
DRE: How was the casting?
PF: It was hard in that we had to see so many people to weed through all the kids and teenagers. They are actors so they brought things to it. It was all about trying to find real people who would bring a real quality to it. That said when the right person walked in we just knew it. In retrospect it didnt feel that hard but when we were going through it, it was. We didnt find the kid who played Sam until they very last casting session. We were completely freaking out because we couldnt find him. But Lindsay we found in the second session. When Linda walked in it just worked.
DRE: What was it about her?
PF: Everything! Every character in the pilot was loosely based on somebody except for Lindsay. That was someone that was completely invented. She is sort of version of who I am now with all my mid-30s angst. I just had this weird image of what she should look like. When Linda walked in it was the look, the attitude, the voice and everything. It was this really weird moment of me not believing this person existed so I immediately was like Shes the one. While everyone else wanted to keep looking. Lauren Ambrose tested for it too but Linda was the one.
DRE: Im in the process of showing all the episodes to my fianc who had never seen it before and when Linda was sitting in the car with her friends going Lets go do something it was just perfect.
PF: She just looked like the girls from the Midwest. I always liked girls who were really pretty but not pretty in that obvious way and would dress down. She just feels like a Midwestern girl to me.
DRE: Were you a big pot smoker?
PF: No I wasnt. I was such a geek and my dad had instilled in me such a fear of drugs. I knew a lot of freaks because we were friends but I was like Oh my god they smoke pot and Ill go crazy if I smoke pot. When I finally did it was a disaster. It was like Lindsays experience on the show because I freaked out. I got all paranoid.
DRE: When the show was cancelled it was a tough time for you because your mom had just passed as well.
PF: Yeah my mom died then two days later they cancelled the show.
DRE: Did it take you a while for you to get things going again?
PF: Yeah it did. It was a tough and bizarre time. But it was no big surprise we got cancelled. We were literally sitting around waiting for it to happen. Judd was so upset about getting cancelled. My brain couldnt take anymore bad news. The nice thing is that they let us finish all the episodes. It was better than things that have happened to other people I know where youre on set filming and they walk in and pull the plug. Then you just go home. So at least it felt like, I wont say fairness, but it had a natural winddown.
DRE: Then you wrote a book, Kick Me: Adventures in Adolescence, which I read was kind of supposed to be a prequel to Freaks and Geeks.
PF: No it was a book that I had started years and years before. When I wrote the pilot for Freaks and Geeks I actually referred to some of the early chapters. Like the dodgeball episode was right out of the book. I had started the book when I was a standup about 15 years ago. I had told my dad that I was writing this book about when I went to high school. He looked at me and said Why would anyone want to read a book about you going to school? then I just put it away. It was something I had always wanted to finish so when Freaks went down I pulled it out because so many of the stories from Freaks and Geeks are true stories. I figured fans of the show might be interested.
Ironically right about that time I called my agent and asked if he could hook me up with his book agents. Then I called the book agent and she told me that she just had lunch with an editor at Random House who asked if I wanted to do a book. It was definitely weird. So I did the book and if you know the show its fun because you see a lot of references and if you dont know the show its funny because its insane true stories.
DRE: Will you always be mining high school for ideas?
PF: I certainly hope not [laughs]. I desperately want to get away from doing it but that said I really like stuff about that time. I like stuff about people who take stuff seriously and then fall apart and it feels like its the end of the world. You can kind of only get away with that when youre a teenager. If a girl breaks up with you, you fall apart and go into this funk, thats ok when youre a teenager. If you do that in your 30s people just think youre weird. Thats one of the reasons I will always have fun writing younger stuff, not that I always will do it. But its a fun place to explore emotions at their rawest and get away with it.
DRE: In ten years will someone be doing a show about the 90s?
PF: Totally. I remember even when I was younger, I had just gotten out of high school and I had just missed watching The Incredible Hulk on TV. All the people who were younger than me watched the show and I remember thinking When they get older they are going to be thinking about The Hulk the way I think about The Brady Bunch.
Years into the future, I got so depressed the other day because I was watching VH1 where they talk about each year from the 80s. Its a funny show and I was digging it. They were on 1986 and I knew all the references because I was a standup then they got to this one section about Inspector Gadget and all these people were talking about it religiously and I felt so old so I turned off the TV.
DRE: You worked as an actor for so long before Freaks and Geeks.
PF: Yes I was a regular on five TV shows and I was in a bunch of movies.
DRE: When did you start doing your own material?
PF: It was with the film Life Sold Separately. I went to USC Film School to be a filmmaker but I also thought it would help me as an actor. But then I became a standup comedian which is like being your own director/writer/producer. Once I was in my early 30s I had to make the transition and start doing stuff. I was always writing scripts and whenever I was on a show I would write an episode but it would get cancelled before it could be produced. Before Life Sold Separately I had written this script called Deaf Julie and the Drifter. I shot a scene out of it to get funding. It almost got off the ground then it fell apart. Because of that I had to write something for myself so thats I why I wrote Life Sold Separately because it could be shot for like $30,000. At the time I was also a regular on Sabrina, the Teenage Witch. I thought it was great because I was on a hit TV show and I was going to be rich. So I took all my money from the first season and made Life Sold Separately. Then when I finished it they called me and said they werent bringing me back for the next season.
DRE: How is your last name pronounced?
PF: Its pronounced Feeg.
DRE: Do you freak out when people say Paul Fag?
PF: Yeah and it happens all the time. They get into this weird middle ground where they say Paul Faag. It just happened yesterday when someone called me. When I was a kid I always wanted to change the spelling of my name to Feeg but I never did. Ironically the German pronunciation is Fige.
DRE: Is that how you came up with Sam Weir because Weir goes so easily to queer?
PF: Yeah I wanted him to have a TV safe version we could do it. Because your name turned into something else is such a big part of childhood.
DRE: Do you have a favorite episode?
PF: The standard answer is that I love them all. I really love Tests and Breasts because the way it ends is nothing like Ive ever seen before. Nothing is resolved and Lindsay realizes she is screwed because she got conned by Daniel so all she can do is start laughing.
DRE: What are you doing now?
PF: I did just direct a couple of episodes of Arrested Development. One of our producers from Freaks and Geeks is the line producer on that show. Its such a funny cast. That is the only TV Ive done besides directing an episode of Undeclared.
DRE: Did your independent movie, I Am David, get picked up for distribution?
PF: Yes Lions Gate is releasing it in October. Its got half the cast of The Passion [of the Christ] which is not anything I planned. I did my movie and my Italian casting director went off and did The Passion. Even my Bulgarian actor played Pontius Pilate.
DRE: Youre Jewish arent you?
PF: Yes so you could only imagine how thrilled I am to be so tied to The Passion. Its really awful. It makes me sick to my stomach.
Originally Artisan had bought the movie and were going to put it out at the beginning of this year but then Lions Gate bought them and wanted six months to regroup. We had won a bunch of film festivals at the end of last year.
DRE: Youre going to get asked a lot about The Passion when you start promoting this movie.
PF: I know and I havent even seen it. I havent even seen Kill Bill because I dont like bloody movies. For no moralistic reasons but I just get ill when I see all that blood.
DRE: Do you have any kids?
PF: No kids, just two dogs. I like to say I hire my kids and work with them then I send them home with their parents at the end of the day. I can barely take care of myself.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
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