Judd gave film Jewish flavour

Jewish Telegraph, August 2007

FILM director Judd Apatow wasn’t trying to give box office smash Knocked Up a Jewish flavour.
But his Jewish actors would not stop talking about being Jewish during filming.
The 40-year-old New Yorker said: “I was not trying to make a point about them being Jewish. I just wanted to hire Seth Rogen’s real life friends and three out of four of them are Jewish . . . and they love to talk about it.
“I was trying to portray them honestly and accurately and I thought well that’s something you don’t see in movies too much, a posse of smart goofy Jewish guys,
“When I was editing the movie I noticed how often they were referencing their Jewishness and it made me laugh.”
Judd began performing stand-up at 17 and in 1992, he produced The Ben Stiller Show. The following year he joined The Larry Sanders Show. He rewrote the script for Jim Carrey’s film The Cable Guy — where he met his wife, Leslie Mann.
When he first started in showbusiness, Judd lived with fellow Jewish comedian Adam Sandler. So how was it living with him?
Judd’s wife Leslie butted in: “Did you like living with him more than you liked living with me?”
Judd laughed: “There were certain aspects of living with you that were impossible with Adam.”
A pivotal moment came for Judd in 1999 when Seth auditioned for his TV show Freaks and Geeks.
“He was a very strange guy with a thick Canadian accent,” Judd recalled. “Seth did a scene with so much anger that he made me laugh. As we shot the show I realised he had a great writer’s mind.”
On their next collaboration, Undeclared, Seth “wrote the best scripts of the writing team which was embarrassing because he was only 18 years old.
“I began thinking this guy’s a movie star. What he is doing would work great in movies in the tradition of John Candy and Bill Murray.”
Judd asked Seth to produce his directorial debut The 40-Year-old Virgin, but “he got very aggressive about wanting to be in it. He did such a good job that I felt he was worthy of being a lead.
“He was pitching movie ideas to me for himself and they were all very big expensive Lords of the Ring’s style movies or movies with aliens or wizards.
“I said you don’t need special effects to be funny. You are funny just standing there. You could just get a girl pregnant and that would be enough for an entire movie just because it’s you.”
Judd has written a film with Sandler and Robert Smigel called You Don’t Mess with the Zohan about a Mossad agent who fakes his death so he can become a hair stylist in New York. It will be released next year.