Why Uncool Is Cool: An Interview with Paul Feig

Popshifter: (laughs) Right! Both of those shows are really funny, but there’s a very different quality to Arrested Development. What was it about AD that made you a fan of the show? And what was it like directing it, particularly the cast, which was a totally different type of ensemble than what you had on Freaks and Geeks?

Arrested Development: “Big Bear likes the honey!”
From StripedWall.com

Paul Feig: Right. Well, honestly, I’d seen the pilot because I had a deal with Imagine Entertainment at the time. Actually, I was about to sign it so they sent me a pilot to say, “Look at the cool shows we’re doing.” To be honest, when I saw the pilot, I was kinda like, “Eh.” I mean, I liked it, but it didn’t sort of grab me. But then there was a marathon of shows and sitting down and watching a bunch in a row, I suddenly got it.

Because that gives you a chance to fall in love with the characters. I mean, that show was very, very dense. If you really think about it, there’s so much going on, it’s almost hard to take it all in. You really kinda need to acclimate to the characters and to the style. And then you’ll go, “Oh, I get it!” It was denser than a Simpsons episode.

I really started to like it a lot and it just so happened that the line producer from Freaks and Geeks [Victor Hsu] was producing AD and he’d asked me a number of times to [direct], but it wasn’t until I watched the marathon that I called him up and said, “Yeah, actually I would like to do it.”

I liked the tone of it. I like anything that’s just. . . different. Once you do [a show like] Freaks, everybody wants you to do something about teenagers. I’m not necessarily against that, but the style of Freaks is a very specific thing. A) it was like childhood as I remembered it. B) I was trying to recreate the feel and tone of the shows that I’d grown up watching which were. . . they weren’t fancy as far as the way they were shot; they were all about character. They didn’t have the camera moving all over the place.

TV in the 1970s was so “talking heads” but because of that I always felt like I invested in the characters more. You’d see them and watch them, see their faces and reactions. So what happened is that the whole generation of directors who came into television in the 1980s had grown up on 70s TV and said, “I don’t want to do the talking heads thing. Now we’re going to make [TV shows] look like movies.” So everybody would use dolly shots and tracking shots and close ups and other fancy shots. Which was cool, at the time it was like, “Wow, TV looks really cool!”

But then what happened over the 80s and into the 90s was that’s how all TV was shot. And so when I did [Freaks and Geeks] I knew that I wanted to have that older look. If for no other reason than it just puts the emphasis back on the characters. I wanted to direct the pilot episode, but I didn’t have any credits.

Popshifter: Awww. . .

The cast of Freaks and Geeks

Paul Feig: I know, it’s very sad. (laughs) It’s better I didn’t actually, because Jake [Kasdan] did such a good job. After he’d shot the pilot, we worked together on how we wanted it to look. I had my one rule that the camera never moves unless somebody in front of the camera is moving. I just hate things like when people are sitting at the dinner table and the camera is slowly tracking around—

Popshifter: Oh, yeah, that’s so overused.

Paul Feig: It’s like, “Why am I looking at the back of somebody’s head? I want to see what the person is saying!”

Popshifter: (laughs)

Paul Feig: It’s like, is this the point of view of a sniper? A midget walking around the table?

So we did it, and the pilot came out great. At one point, I remember Jake saying, “Wow, I love the look of the show; it looks so much like a movie.” And I realized it had all come full circle. He was so much younger than us—like 23 when he shot the pilot—while I was in my mid-30s. So he’d grown up on TV that was trying to look like movies, and to him, that’s what TV looked like. So suddenly it went back to the old style of TV; suddenly it was very “independent film.”

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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