Mike Judge Talks About New Film Extract, Old Show King Of The Hill And What It’s Like To Always Be The Boss
Posted September 5, 2009 4:15 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
Mike Judge is, it would seem, at a crossroads of sorts.
The brilliant comedic mind behind name brands like Beavis and Butt-Head, Office Space and King Of The Hill welcomes his newest film Extract – starring Jason Bateman, Ben Affleck and Mila Kunis – into the world Friday, while his second animated brainchild, King Of The Hill, prepares for what appears to be its final bow on Sept. 13 after 13 seasons.
Extract is typical Judge. With a bit lip and tongue in cheek, the film looks at the world of a small factory owner (Bateman), whose marital and business struggles force a thorough contemplation of what he wants from the rest of his life.
The writer and director sat down with CityNews.ca’s Aaron Miller and talked about the coming and the going.
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AM: Given your already lengthy history of examining the American working class, where did the inspiration for Extract come from?
MJ: A couple of things. I’d worked in factory settings a couple of times and that factory, blue-collar world has its own unique set of characters, the way cubicles do.
A friend of mine started working at a parts warehouse, he’d been a musician most of his life and had to give up going on the road and was telling me about this woman who just sits there with her arms folded on her stool and just shakes her head at everybody. She’s got a Tweety Bird t-shirt and a fanny pack. I didn’t see the woman he was talking about but I feel like I’ve seen her 100 times. And he told me the one thing that she said was, “I’m just going to sit here.”
There’s a lot of those archetypes in a factory. I’d also kind of got inspired by the fact that I’d worked so many jobs and I was pushing 30 by the time Beavis and Butt-Head became a show and so I never had even one person working for me and I went from having nobody to as many as 90 people at one point.
I started going, “Aw man, these people, they don’t appreciate anything, they take advantage of me when I’m nice and then I realized they’re like I was when I was an employee and I’m the boss now. So I wanted to do something that was sympathetic to the boss.
But not like Office Space, those bosses were mid-management types who probably thrive on the power trip of telling people what to do. I never enjoyed that part of it, I don’t like telling people to do something they don’t want to do. I do like steering a ship, getting a big project going, making it happen and all that.
AM: You’ve talked in the past about how important casting is and how carefully you select your casts. How did you settle on the cast of Extract?
MJ: When I wrote it I didn’t have anybody in mind because I started writing it back in 2000 or maybe even 1999. I put it on the shelf for a long time and I saw Jason Bateman in Arrested Development and I thought, “Man, this guy’s great.”
I like watching him react to craziness around him and he’s fun to watch when he’s frustrated. Bob Newhart had that quality, where you just like watching him react to stuff and he can be funny while letting everyone around him be funny and at the same time make it look natural.
So I rewrote it imagining him doing it. He was the first actor I spoke to and he said he wanted to do it and I just never took it to anyone else.
The rest was a standard casting process. To me casting is like 80 per cent of it or more and I probably drive the casting directors crazy because I keep finding something wrong with everybody. I’d seen Mila Kunis in Forgetting Sarah Marshall. I hadn’t seen much of That 70s Show but thought she’d be really good.
And then I heard Ben Affleck was interested and I thought, “Well no, it’s Jason Bateman.” And my casting director said, “No, he wants to play Dean.”
I met with him and he started telling me about this guy he went to high school with and he was kind of channeling this character and it was really making me laugh. He did a read through of the script with Jason and I just loved what he was doing. It was just so fun on the set. All the way through it was really fun with him.
AM: In a strange way your comedy has always been sort of subtle. Is that something you’re conscious of when you’re writing?
MJ: I think it’s probably the natural writing style. Idiocracy, the first draft I co-wrote, and same thing with the Beavis and Butt-Head Do America. Sometimes when I’m doing that, that stuff tends to be slightly more broad, I think that’s probably because you’re trying to make each other laugh. I don’t sit down and say, “OK I need to be more subtle,” or anything.
I think the best that I’ve written, dialogue especially, tends to come really quickly and I guess that’s just what comes naturally. I actually think Beavis and Butt-Head is more subtle than what people might think.
It’s funny, subtle is a bad word to say in Hollywood even though there’s plenty of subtle stuff that makes money. On Office Space I drove the studio crazy. Here I’d never made a live action movie, they were a little nervous as it was and they look at the dailies and it’s just a guy going “Yeah…”
(Imitating Hollywood exec in Hank Hill voice) “Where’s the punchline? What’s he doing?” They wanted me to re-shoot stuff, but that movie ended up making a lot of money and they want sequels and merchandise and all this stuff. But yeah, I got to be careful saying subtle.
AM: The King Of The Hill series finale is right around the corner. What does that mean to you after 13 seasons?
MJ: We were completely cancelled once before and this, they’re calling it a grand finale but it’s basically just two episodes that were done before we knew it was cancelled. We actually did a last episode three or four years ago which I thought was a great last episode. It kind of bummed me out.
We were going to hold it off for a year because we thought we were going to be cancelled the next year, which I think we did and then finally we just had to re-cut it and change it around so it didn’t seem so final.
It bummed me out because it seemed like a perfect, appropriate last episode. And actually the way it aired probably seems a bit odd because of all the things we had to change. It’s still a good episode but it probably suffered from that a little bit.
It’s probably a good time to stop. I’d rather quit when it’s still decent than run it into the ground. I feel like we had some good episodes this season. I’m OK with it, because it’s hard to keep it fresh.
And I get a little stressed out about stuff like, OK, how many years are we going to go keeping them the same age? A show like The Simpsons is so surreal that they can get away with another 70 years. King Of The Hill is so reality based. When we started out they didn’t have cell phones, then they do but Bobby’s the same age as he was 13 years ago. So it starts to get a little tricky.
AM: Some of the trailers for Extract suggest it’s a film based on what men really think about. Is this just movie about sex?
MJ: I don’t think it’s about that. The theatrical trailer they did I actually liked a lot, I haven’t seen too many of the TV ones but I wouldn’t call it a sex comedy or anything like that.
To me it’s more about this guy that’s been working towards this goal and dreaming about retiring and selling the company and all that, and then coming to realize that old thing about how it’s not about the destination it’s about the journey and kind of realizing he probably shouldn’t have free time on his hands.
He should probably just stick to what he does and appreciate that he’s got a nice house and a wife. And also just about kind of the every day life of somebody like that who’s in charge and responsible for a lot of people. That part of it, like I said, I just thought that dynamic was kind of funny.
They did that on Office Space too. They did a trailer that looked like it was an ad for Porky’s and they took any little sex thing out of the movie and played that up. Back then the wisdom was, “Well if you’re going to go R you gotta go hard R.” The commercial was like, “Oooh it’s so naughty it’s a naughty, nasty movie.”
That didn’t work, that didn’t get anyone into the theatres. So who knows?
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Extract opened September 4.