Why Uncool Is Cool: An Interview with Paul Feig

Paul Feig: I have no competitiveness, I just have fun doing it and if I’m losing I don’t care. So people tend to think I’m not competitive. But I am competitive in my field, I mean, I’m not trying to screw people over, but I’m competitive enough where I want to get what I want. (laughs) If somebody else is competing with me for it, then I will try to outdo them.

So I do think you need a bit of that, not a “killer” instinct, but you need a confidence. You have to have confidence, but then you can’t have so much confidence that it closes you off to hearing what people think of your work. You do have to be open to notes.

What happens when you’re younger or newer in the business, you get very, “Nobody’s going to tell me what to do; they’re not going to water my stuff down. They don’t get it.”

And it is true that people might not get it, but then that is a problem. I’m not saying that you have to water everything down so much that it’s dumb, but you do have to be in tune if people don’t understand something, if they’re not getting something. Then it’s something you’ve done wrong.

Signed Freaks and Geeks script
From the
McKinley High fan page

Anything you do, especially in television or the movies, you get the notes. Every writer, producer, director knows, “Here come the notes from the studio; here come the notes from the network; here come the notes from the executives.” And you’re always like, “Oh, they’re going to be stupid, blahblahblah.”

But what I’ve learned over the years is, just listen to the notes. Granted, they’re going to sound really stupid, but then, here’s the thing. Most people who aren’t creative, who aren’t writers, don’t really know how to say things. They don’t know how to pinpoint a problem; they just know there is a problem. And then what happens is, in order to justify their jobs, they’ll invent what they think the real problem is. And that’s where the stupid notes come from. Because their solution or interpretation will be way off base.

But if you are open enough to hear that and go, “What’s the problem, what aren’t they getting?” then that’s valid. So that’s what you need to be open to hear. When you give stuff to friends to read, you don’t want to hear, “Oh, that’s perfect, that’s great, don’t touch a word!” I mean, if somebody you trust actually says that and it’s true, then that’s great.

I mean, honestly, the Freaks and Geeks pilot I wrote as a spec script and I sent it to Judd [Apatow] and everyone and they loved it and NBC didn’t want us to change a word. Ironically, once we cast it, we wanted to change a lot of it.

But for some reason that just flowed out of me. I always break it down into two kinds of notes. The notes I like are, “I didn’t understand this.” The notes I don’t like are, “If it were me, I would have done it this way.” Those are the ones where you go, “Okay, now you’re watering down my thing. You can do your own thing and that’s fine.”

You gotta be open to people not getting stuff. I see a lot of stuff, especially in movies, where I think, “There is a problem.” Somebody didn’t solve something. Somebody dug in or said, “You’re an idiot if you don’t get this.” If there was a note on this, that note should have been taken to heart.

You want to keep your integrity and you want to do something great, but you have to entertain an audience. And if you want to make something that’s very rarified, for a very small audience, that’s great, and I support that 100 percent.

Popshifter: But TV doesn’t really work well with that.

Paul Feig: No, because you’ve got to get a big audience. But to bring it back to Freaks: I honestly felt, when I wrote Freaks, that we were being very mainstream. It doesn’t mean that I was calculating to be commercial; in my head I thought, “Who wouldn’t like to see their high school experience shown from a safe distance where it’s funny, and you can kind of enjoy it now, and you’re not going through it yourself?”

What I didn’t bank on was that most people don’t want to re-experience that. (laughs)

I didn’t go into it thinking, “Oh, this is going to be great, and people aren’t going to get it, but it’s honest and real and screw them!”

Popshifter: (laughs)

Click to read more from Paul Feig on. . .

Directing Freaks and Geeks
Directing Arrested Development
His obsessive knowledge of laugh tracks
More on laugh tracks, plus the “comedy of innocence”
Dealing with Internet jerks
The outsider, plus embarrassing fanboy encounters
“If it’s fun, it’s fun.”
Music of today vs. music of yesterday
The Hollywood version of funny
What’s cool and uncool
Listening to “the notes”
Where television is today
The fallout from Unaccompanied Minors
His new show Kath and Kim and his upcoming book

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