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.
Absolutely. At what point did the surreality of the scenario set in — you know, having scenes where a COVID officer is explaining COVID protocols on a set where, probably not much earlier, you went through an exact same sort of situation?
The whole movie was like that, because if you would look on the other side of the camera, the thing that we were making fun of was five feet from our fake version of it. So we’ve got Harry dressed up as the COVID supervisor, doing a speech about how to stay safe on set. And then, you know, five minutes later that guy’s making the real speech. So it was like that all the time.
It was also weird just because the movie is about, “Do we even need a movie, should people be taking these risks to make a movie?” And we’re making fun of people who think it’s important to carry on while we’re doing it. So we’re mocking the thing that we’re actually doing. But luckily we didn’t have one case, the entire shoot. No one was positive. And we had very strict protocols and I think Netflix really knew what they were doing, in terms of helping us know how to stay safe.
If there’s one thing I trust Netflix to do, it’s implement incredibly efficient protocols for doing things.
Absolutely. And the person that we were talking to the whole time is now the surgeon general of the United States, Vivek H. Murthy. He was the Netflix consultant in charge of explaining the protocols. So we felt that we had good, good advice.
It’s fantastic that you had really strong COVID protocols on set — but were you at all concerned about the aspects of the film which include making fun of people breaking COVID protocols?
We’ve talked about that constantly. How do we do this? First of all, if everyone’s wearing a mask in the movie who wants to watch the movie, you don’t wanna watch a movie where everyone’s in a mask. So we were like, what do we, what does this mean? And, and we really debated the ethics of all of that.
Then we decided, well, the COVID supervisor doesn’t know what he’s doing. And so everyone is doing it wrong. And I think that comes across in the movie. We’re not saying that anything they do in the movie is the appropriate thing to do. It’s all the wrong thing to do.
So every day I said, how do I get everyone to not be wearing the masks in these scenes when they’re shooting? So I would have people just chewing their mask. Sometimes a mask is on someone’s ear. Sometimes somebody’s, you know, holding their mask and they’re like, “I’m drinking. That’s why I’m not wearing it.”
That became an art: How many different ways can we have people ignoring COVID protocols? But I think that the satire of the movie is about that. It’s about that we all had all these restrictions, we’re all deciding which ones will follow how tight to be. We’re all debating what we think is safe, and a lot of us are just completely wrong in our choices.
Yeah, and to be fair, for a good portion of the last couple of years, there were wildly conflicting reports about what was actually effective anyway.
And I think we’re making fun of that too. Which by the way, you know, for me, I’m totally comfortable with that. I think that, you know, the science is always evolving. If they tell me to wash my Amazon boxes and then out of the blue, they’re like, you don’t need to wash Amazon boxes, I’m not mad. I know we’re all doing our best to figure it out as we go.
But in the movie, it is funny that they’re sitting there washing a pineapple and they’re trying to get every groove clean — because we all did that. You know, it was very extreme. And then we realized what was actually necessary.
At what point did you realize how much dance would be a part of this movie?
I always wanted there to be a lot of dance in the movie. Like Spielberg, I like working with dance. That’s what I got from it. I said, I’m gonna outdo West Side Story. [Laughs]
Early on we had this idea that Iris would play an influencer who has a hundred million social media followers. And that’s why she’s been forced into this movie, even though she does not know how to act. And we wanted to see a few dances.
There are three dances in the movie. There was one that we cut out, because there was just so many dances. We always thought, “Let’s just do a whole bunch, and we’ll pick the best ones.” And the whole cast had to study these dances, which were choreographed by Ryan Heffington, who did the finale this year and last year on Euphoria and all these amazing Sia videos. And they worked hard.
I think they thought they’d have to go to a couple of dance rehearsals. It was a ton — four months for everyone to be able to do these. And I think everyone was happy to have something physical to do. We’ve all been sitting on our couches for a year and a half. It was fun to, get active. And then I knew that no matter how hard they tried, no matter how perfectly they did the dance, it would look stupid. So that happened.
The Bubble (Netflix)
The film has a lot of cameos, especially a couple of in-person cameos, which are delightful surprises. Was it just kind of a process of calling people up and saying, “Hey, if you’re not busy…”
That was it. And I thought, oh, because of Zoom, you could have Zoom cameos, and so many ways to do this. Kate McKinnon is in the movie — she plays the head of the studio who won’t shut down the movie, no matter how badly it’s going, and we had this idea that every time you see her, she’s in a different exotic location.
Which is what would happen — you would talk to certain people you knew, and they were, they were just like on safari somewhere. They were having a completely different, weird version of the pandemic than other people. So we shot that on a green-screen stage in New York months after we finished shooting the movie and she was riotously funny. I’m always looking to find ways to connect with people I wanna collaborate with, and I’ve always wanted to do something with Kate McKinnon. So I love that she does something special in this.
What went into bringing Beck on board?
I’ve done a lot of benefits with Beck at Largo, the theater in Los Angeles. And he’s really funny. He does these amazing acoustic sets and he’s hilarious. So we had this idea that one of the ways the studio tries to placate this angry group of actors who are running outta gas is by projecting a live concert onto the side of the hotel.
When we shot it, we didn’t know who would do it. So I just sang a song and everyone danced to the song. And then when we were wrapped, I’m like, oh, I wonder who could do that? Now we have to put the song in. And I talked to Beck and he was really into it, and then I went to his house and watched him record “Ladies Night.” And it was amazing. That’s one of my favorite sequences.
Do you remember what the song was you sang?
It was “Ladies Night.” I sang “Ladies Night.” Because I needed to get everyone dancing and I thought, I don’t know what song I’ll use, but I’ll just sing “Ladies Night.” So I’m like, oh yes, it’s “Ladies Night.” And they’re like trying to dance to my bad singing. And somehow it works through the magic of cinema.
Talk me through the final credit song, and getting Adam Levine involved.
Finally, the question I’ve been waiting for! The score was recorded by Mike Andrews who did everything from Bridesmaids to Freaks and Geeks with us. He’s amazing. He did The King of Staten Island and we knew we wanted a unique sound and I thought maybe he should do it with Andrew Bird. So there’s this really beautiful, but also funny and demented, violin score in there.
Then for the end song, we wanted to have the type of song that would be at the end of a dinosaur action movie. So we wrote this song called “Cliff Beasts”… No, the name of the song is “Wings of Stone.” It’s a lament, if you will. It’s a dinosaur talking about how it’s been pushed out by technology and humans, but ultimately he wants his revenge.
So I wrote the lyrics of the song with Dan Bern, and then we collaborated with Andrew Watt, the great producer who’s done so many amazing things with people like Post Malone and Miley Cyrus, he did the new Eddie Vedder album. And then he and Josh Klinghoffer (formerly of Red Hot Chili Peppers) recorded this incredible track. I watched them record it, they just had this idea of what would like an ’80s soundtrack song for a movie like Lethal Weapon sound now, like, or something Phil Collins did.
And then we asked Adam Levine to sing it. I actually think it’s so good, you don’t notice it’s a joke. It’s the only error in the movie, is all of them are so talented that it’s not bad enough. It actually kind of kicks ass. So we’re making right now an animated music video, so people actually know it’s meant to be both kick-ass and funny.
The Bubble is streaming now on Netflix.