My agents told me on a Friday, “We think you’re going to get an offer on Monday.” I was like, “I don’t think you’re correct.” Then they called me again and said, “Yeah, it’s happening.”
The first week I was just like, “What am I doing? This is crazy.” I didn’t meet George Clooney until we were on set together. The first thing that we shot together, we were doing kind of a walk and talk, and we were standing waiting to go and he says, “Do you get nervous? I get nervous.” I was like, “Oh my God!” That was the smallest thing but just opened up my whole world.
He probably does that for everybody when he can tell they’re thinking, “What am I doing here? I don’t belong here.” Just a couple of words from him and you’re like, “Oh my God, he’s a person, and I’m a person, we’re the same.”
Looking back on it, there were times he could tell that I was in my head, overthinking. There was a day when I was really in my head about a scene and he was throwing Nerf footballs around, like intentionally kind of hitting me and stuff. I was genuinely like, “Bro, I’m trying to get in the scene and stuff.” But he knows you need to snap out of it a little bit.
There was a day when we were shooting the scene where I’m sitting across from the computer screen and I’m firing a guy over the computer screen for the first time. It’s an older guy. George was sitting next to me and he sat there next to me all day because I couldn’t move, I was stuck. It was such a complicated, heavy scene. They were moving camera equipment and stuff and I was sitting there and he sat next to me.
I remember asking, “Can you run lines with me?” He immediately did the scene with me and I didn’t realize until later: he’s a fucking movie star, he could have just fucked off and called his agent, whatever. Let alone run a scene with me that he’s not even in. He’s there but he ran the other guy’s lines with me. That kind of generosity, somehow I think about all the time. If he can be that generous, everybody should be able to do that.
JONAH HILL—ACTOR, WRITER, PRODUCER
The day I shot my scene in The 40-Year-Old Virgin, it was probably I would say the most important day of my life. Definitely one of them.
I was friendly with Seth Rogen and met Judd Apatow in the audition for that movie. I met Seth in a movie theater before then. I just sat behind him, and Jason Schwartzman was a mutual friend of ours, so we talked about Jason and how great of a guy he is, which he is. So we were friendly and then I got that part and it was one line. And the whole bit was about an eBay store with Catherine Keener and it didn’t make sense because I want to buy a skateboard and she said you can’t, I’m like, I don’t get it, and that was the whole scene.
Now, it was pouring rain that day when I got there. This sounds like I’m trying to be overly cinematic or something. But it was pouring rain and they couldn’t shoot the scene they were trying to shoot outside, so we had a whole day to shoot this one fucking line scene and so Judd was just like, “Start.” I noticed everyone was improvising, so I just was like this is an opportunity to show someone who I think is really, really amazing and look up to so much that maybe I could improvise with these other people here. And I got to improvise that scene for a whole day. We found those random goldfish boots and it turned into me talking shit to Keener, Catherine Keener, who by the way is the greatest person in the world. Seth and Judd would call me over the months that they were test-screening the movie for audiences and say, “There’s no logical reason for this scene to even be in the movie. Like, all we want to do is cut it out, but it keeps getting really big laughs.”
So that was a moment for me that really, I think—you would have to ask them—but I think it made Judd want to continue working with me. I am really grateful to him in every way.
JASON SCHWARTZMAN—ACTOR, WRITER, MUSICIAN
When I was seventeen years old, I was in the middle of making a record, I was going into my senior year of high school and my grandfather, Carmine, who had passed away, had written a score for a movie. My uncle, to celebrate it, was going to have the score played live in Napa. He was inviting lots of people from San Francisco. It was a charity type of event, I believe. Not totally sure. I wasn’t supposed to go. Anyway my mom was going and last minute she’s like, you’ve got to come, it was my father’s music. You’ve got to hear my father’s music.
I rented a tuxedo and we went up and at this party there was a woman named Davia there who was a local casting director in San Francisco. Because she’s from San Francisco, she knew my cousins. They were friends and they were talking at this party and my cousin said, “What are you up to?” and she said, “I’m the San Francisco wing of the casting for this movie Rushmore.” My cousin said, “What’s it about?” She said it’s about an eccentric fifteen-year-old who writes plays and has a crush on an older woman. She said, “That’s funny, it sounds kind of like my cousin Jason. He’s right over there.”
I had rented a tuxedo with tails. I had a hat, a cane maybe. I was just like a clown. A classic type of clown person. She invited me over and said, “This is Davia,” and then she walked away. Davia started telling me that she was casting for this movie and would I like to audition. I said, “Well, I’m a drummer, I’m not an actor.” She said, “Well, but Sofia said that you were in her play and that you might have some things in common with this character.” But also I had a little bit of drummer mentality in full effect at this time, which is “Are you sure you don’t want to talk to the lead singer?”
She says, “No, no, I think you should audition.”
I said, “I’m not an actor, I never auditioned. It’s silly that I would even do this.”
She says, “What’s your address? We’ll send you the script.” This was on a weekend.
I got home and on Monday this manila envelope arrived with Rushmore. I remember reading it, thinking, holy shit, this is everything that I love. At that time I hadn’t really seen a lot of movies that were what I was into. I had never seen a movie that got me the way music did. That kind of fuzzy feeling. It was everything that I think about. I really connected to it.