Judd Apatow’s The Bubble might be one of the most meta filmmaking experiences of all time, as the film about making a movie during the pandemic was of course shot during the pandemic. And as the veteran writer/director/producer tells Consequence, he didn’t miss the surreality of the fact that “we were mocking the thing that we’re actually doing.”
The Bubble stars an eclectic ensemble of well-known comedy stars as well as a variety of new faces, playing the cast and crew of Cliff Beasts 6, a (fake) big-budget blockbuster sequel that’s trying to finish up production despite the (very real) threat of COVID. While a spoof, the film does mirror real productions that were finished up during lockdown, something which Apatow used while working on the film.
He also brought together not just a cast including Karen Gillan, Fred Armisen, Maria Bakalova, David Duchovny, Keegan-Michael Key, Leslie Mann, Kate McKinnon, Pedro Pascal, Peter Serafinowicz, and Guz Khan for the project, but unexpected collaborators from elsewhere: Amongst other well-known folks, Beck, Euphoria choreographer Ryan Heffington, former Red Hot Chili Peppers member Josh Klinghoffer, and Adam Levine all contributed to the making of the film.
In this interview with Apatow, which you can watch above or read below, transcribed and edited for clarity, he explains the original inspiration for the film, how he assembled this cast, why there’s so much dancing in the film, and what it was really like to take on a comedy project like this in deeply unfunny times.
I wanted to start off by asking what was the kickoff for this? What got you excited about the idea of doing it?
I was promoting The King of Staten Island in June [2020], as the pandemic was starting. And it was all just on my couch. Normally we would travel around the country and around the world, but then everything was just sitting on the couch, and then that ended and suddenly I had nothing to do and I could just sit around and do nothing.
So I started taking long walks and then one day on the walk, this idea occurred to me, oh, there’s something about these bubbles. First I thought about the NBA bubble. I was like, what’s going on in there? That sounds tense. Maybe there’s a story in a fake NBA bubble, a movie. And then I started hearing about all these different productions, Mission: Impossible and Jurassic World. And The White Lotus was getting started. And James Bond and everything was just beginning to fire back up.
And I thought, oh, this must be really hard on everybody. Maybe that’s a funny scenario for almost like a Christopher Guest movie, of a bunch of actors stuck in a hotel having a nervous breakdown. And I wanted it to be a two-set movie. So it’s the hotel and the green screen studio set where they’re making some sort of fantasy film.
And then we thought, well, maybe flying dinosaurs. Because we were just trying to think about what can you do with green screens? It has to be a monster at some point. So maybe it’s a flying Tyrannosaurus Rex, because we didn’t wanna just do dinosaurs. We were like, what is a way to do this weirder? I always think about movies like Orca, where there would be Jaws and then they would make the rip off version about whales. So this became a little bit like that.
So in the universe of The Bubble, Cliff Beasts is like a competitor to Jurassic Park?
Well, in the movie it’s described as, I think, the 28th most successful action movie franchise. Like there’s Jaws and, well, what’s the name of that movie with the giant shark?
[Crosstalk ensues, as we attempt to remember the name of the film Apatow is thinking about.]
The Meg?
The Meg! We’re The Meg.
That’s perfect. When you were conceiving all these aspects, how deep into the mythology did you get? Do you have a full Cliff Beasts mythology bible written up?
We did have to think through, you know, what happened in the other movies. Like there’s one movie called Beijing Beast — clearly they made a movie just to get good distribution in China. At one point there’s one that’s in space, there’s one that’s underwater. So it’s all about just trying to figure out new ways to keep the franchise alive. And then we had to think about what were the relationships between all the actors — who likes each other, who hates each other.
How much were you able to talk to people who were going through the actual experience of making a movie in a bubble?
We had a few friends that were in bubbles at the time — Pete Holmes was in a bubble, he went and shot the Home Alone Disney+ movie. We knew people and I would call and go, “What’s happening?” Usually I would say, “I wrote this scene, does this seem accurate?” And they would say, “That happened yesterday.”
So it wasn’t so much that people told me [things] — they just confirmed, yes, people are escaping, people aren’t following the rules sometimes, because they’re under so much pressure and they’re cracking. So the movie really is an imagining of a full meltdown. I don’t think people ever got to this place.
The Bubble (Netflix)
One would hope. So once you had the premise, what went into assembling the cast? I talked to Fred Armisen and he mentioned that you reached out to him, but you didn’t at that time have a role in mind for him — or you didn’t tell him you had a role in mind for him.
I wasn’t sure. He may have been one of the first people I went to. I just thought, oh, this is the, the perfect way to get to work with Fred Armisen, which I’ve always wanted to do. We worked together on the first Anchorman — he played Tino, the man who ran the jazz flute club. I dunno if it’s all jazz flute, but it was jazz when Ron Burgundy was there.
And yeah, I didn’t know what he would be, because he could have been an actor in the movie, but I decided to make him someone who won Sundance for a movie he shot on his iPhone while working at Home Depot — he made a romantic comedy called Tiles of Love. I love the idea of the overwhelmed Sundance director dealing with a hundred million dollar budget at this time.
A lot of it was who have I always wanted to do things with. Keegan’s someone that I’ve talked to for a long time about collaborating on something, David Duchovny and I hadn’t worked together since The Larry Sanders Show. Jake Kasdan always talked about how incredible Karen Gillen was. Sacha [Baron Cohen] told me about Maria Bakalova.
And I always have fun with Leslie and Iris [Mann and Apatow, his wife and daughter]. We were in the house together, kicking around ideas for this for months. And it gave us a way to go out of our home to go do something — we all went to England for four months to shoot it, and it helped keep us sane, because we had something to do work on.
At what point did you start looking your ensemble and say, “Okay, we’ve got this element of comedy, we’ve got this element of comedy. What we need now is a Pedro Pascal to spice things up”?
Well, you know, sometimes it’s as simple as calling agents that I know, I’m just saying, who do you think’s up for this, who works in this world that might wanna lampoon themselves a little bit or create a weirder character than they normally play? I love Pedro in a lot of things — he is really incredible on Narcos and it felt like, you know, to have the Mandalorian in there made sense. That’s how a lot of it came about.
And then I was very excited to have an international comedy cast because you don’t usually have people from all over the world performing comedy together where you get to see all the different styles. So we had Vir Das, who’s from India, and Maria Bakalova and, and Peter Serafinowitz and Harry Trevaldwyn, and Samson Kayo and Danielle Vitalis — they’re on this amazing show called Famalam that’s on in England. That’s what I was most gratified about, because the talent pool there is so deep, but in America we don’t see a lot of those people.
The Bubble (Netflix)
Yeah, absolutely. When it comes to Harry [Trevaldwyn], he seems like he’s poised to break out really big very soon. But he has just kind of gotten started with his career. Was that a casting agent find?
Peter Serafinowitz turned me onto Harry, who plays the COVID supervisor, who doesn’t know what he’s doing. He’s the guy who talks about the sweet eyes in the trailer. And he had never done anything before. All he had done is his Instagram feed, where he would just say funny things into his Instagram. And Peter has a friend who knew him and was kicking around doing something with him.
I met with him — I didn’t have a part, even, I just said, “Well, maybe you could be like a COVID supervisor, and I don’t have anything in the script for you, but you just come every day and I’ll just toss you into moments so that you’re always there testing people.”
That really is all we had until rehearsals, then we started kicking around how he would be, and then on the first day he just murdered so hard. The whole cast couldn’t believe it. It was his first day ever on a big movie set like that, and then he kept doing it every day until he was stealing a lot of the movie. So I’m really excited for people to see Harry.
