Canadian Seth Rogen on Sunday candidly revealed the secret to his success in Hollywood after starting out as a child stand-up comic in Vancouver.
“Hollywood is hard and it has crushed me sometimes and crushed those around me many times,” he said during a keynote conversation as part of TIFF: The Market. At the same time, Rogen said success in La La Land is possible, “because I did it.”
But how? “I was lucky coming up,” he said after Rogen left Vancouver at around 16 years of age and eventually linked up with comedy kingpin Judd Apatow. Having brought two films to TIFF this year — Babies, directed by Lauren Miller Rogen, and Tangles, an animated film which Rogen and Miller Rogen produced — Rogen reminisced over his first job in Vancouver doing stand-up at a lesbian bar called The Lotus. “It went very well,” he reported.
Rogen’s parents scheduled him for stand-up comedy classes, and his mother drove him to clubs, where fellow comics may not have been the best influence on the young boy. “They really believed one day I would make enough money to buy them a house, which I did. So it worked,” Rogen said of his parents as he also revealed an underlying optimism and confidence that has typified his career in entertainment.
After sorting through Vancouver video rental stores along with friend Evan Goldberg, and watching endless movies, they realized that John Candy and Michael J. Fox were Canadians. But early on, the nationality of Hollywood actors and players little mattered to Rogen.
“Now I only watch Canadian things. It’s never enough,” he then assured his TIFF audience to applause. Once in Los Angeles, Rogen said Judd Apatow told him to write honestly about his life and comedy. And one day while in a writers’ room for Knocked Up, Rogen and his team heard Apatow shout out from an adjoining office: “Less semen, more emotion.”
Rogen and writing partner Evan Goldberg — whom he has been friends with since both were 12 years of age — have also been writing comedy for 30 years and counting. “There’s a disturbing amount of overlap in our skill sets,” Rogen said about their long partnership. “And we’re very forgiving of one another.”
He added he isn’t given to writer’s block: “I’m sometimes excited by the blank page. I put very little pressure on myself when I’m just writing something at first.” And hard work once in Los Angeles paid off after early Rogen had fleeting success with Freaks and Geeks and other projects and did auditions and wrote scripts that didn’t get picked up by the major studios.
“It’s healthier to be mad at everyone else. It’s healthier to say it’s unfair. I’m getting fucked,” he said of explaining his lack of progress ascending the ladder in Hollywood. But success did come for Rogen, most recently with the AppleTV+ series The Studio, now in its second season.
The series has given Rogen creative freedom because he wears so many hats on set. “We wanted no oversight in any way, shape or form. And Apple, to its credit, really has let us do what we want. God bless them,” he told the TIFF audience.
“I don’t feel like I’m moving through the world any differently than I was before the show,” which is about Hollywood and has a company town taking notice of when The Studio isn’t all artifice and real experience and events may inspire scripts.
Rogen talked about Babies, written and directed by Lauren Miller Rogen, which in part reflects his current age and life. “It’s a by-product of me getting older and just trying to make things I really like and I really relate to,” he said.
Babies is also a product of Rogen’s wife, Miller Rogen, seeing her mother diagnosed with Alzheimer’s when she was just 55 years of age and around the time the couple started dating. “It really does permeate through the screen. It’s something I couldn’t be more excited to be part of. And people seem to be really connecting to it. But it’s sad. Be careful,” Rogen observed.
And after having box office success with 50/50, his 2011 cancer comedy, Rogen believed it was also worth finding humor in an illness set around ageing. “If you can make cancer funny, you should also try to make Alzheimer’s funny,” he insisted.
The Toronto Film Festival runs through to Sept. 20.
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