2010 Louis C.K. Paley Center Full Interview

first our moderator time columnist james ponowozzik james joined the magazine in 1999 after serving his media critic and editor at salon.com he's also a regular commentator for npr's on the media and all things considered and we're delighted to have him here tonight so please welcome james [Applause] and of course louis ck himself one of the most admired comedians working today who tempers his raw confessional material with warmth and humanity a respected comedian since his emergence in the mid-80s he's written for late night with david letterman late night with conan o'brien the dana carvey show and the chris rock show garnet what was that for diana carvey or chris rock garnering multiple emmy nominations along the way he also wrote the cult classic film pootie tang [Applause] [Music] one rave reviews for his series of hbo stand-up specials and created and starred in the innovative series lucky louie no no less an authority on comedy than ricky gervais recently had this to say about louie i hope i don't embarrass you but louis ck is the funniest bravest and most honest stand-up comic in the world at the moment he mixes a classic observational style with a smart modern edge and deals with the most taboo subjects while remaining the likable underdog that carries the weight of an uncaring world on his shoulders he's angry and right a formidable comedy partnership he went on to call luis k a true artist and louis the show the most interesting and important comedy of the year so please welcome louis ck that was a lot of clips that was a lot well that's all we have time for yeah that was a lot um no seriously i was thinking this before but you know i've seen those clips several times and honestly like those are you know just a couple of the best scenes i've seen of anything you know this season it's weird seeing them all strung together like that it's a little there's something wrong with me i think anyway go ahead well i mean the thing i was struck by just watching it now i've watched them a bunch of times but particularly the scenes from bully and god i was kind of played differently in a big room than i'd seen them before yeah you know and there were laughs where i wouldn't think there would be less but but then it sort of makes sense because there's tension and it's building detention and the whole thing kind of made me think you know like do you think of the show as a as a comedy or a drama or a comedy with part drama or uh well it's a comedy and i definitely i feel sometimes a little irresponsible when i'm that unfunny uh but i also to me that stuff is really funny uh it's not funny that you laugh like in the earlier clips and it is interesting to watch with the audience because i watched some pieces of the show with audiences like when we premiered we had a party and stuff and people came so i watched people laugh but watching people watch the bully scene is really intense uh with an audience because it's so humiliating and also i even though i shot it and deliberately made myself go through that it's painful to watch me yeah uh i mean the kids half my size i probably could have taken them but uh but i don't fight i'm not that guy so anyway it was really interesting to watch with an audience but yeah i don't know i guess it's a kind of shows again i to me it's really funny that a guy gets that debate and loses a woman over it i think that's really funny um and i mean i may be wrong but it is just my sense of humor tells me that the funniest thing that we did all season was that dude nailing the jesus back up because he just had to you know it's got to be done before jesus is like i had 10 minutes off of there and i gotta go back up i have a lot of sympathy for jesus that i don't feel like the church had that's why it's just so mean and i feel like he did it the same way the romans did and it's just funny that a priest would tell him get it get him back up there all right you know i'll do it so that's funny to me and you know it's not laugh laugh funny the way that the earlier stuff is but it makes me laugh but it's funny when you sit down and you watch them there's you know there's kind of thematic similarities between some of the really hahaha funny stuff and the i mean in the first the dr ben clip yeah um you show your naked ass while a man makes yeah fun of your penis and and in bullying obviously you know you've got the character being what's more what's more difficult what's harder to watch yeah yeah yeah it's definitely this is all this stuff is pretty uh self you know mutilating and that's why it was funny package to watch yeah for me and then having amy landecker who i'm trying to [ __ ] in one scene and then she's my mom in the next [Applause] which is you know something i did consciously but not i didn't expect to ever see them back to back like [Music] but one reason i did it is because at the end she when i watched she auditioned before for she auditioned for the mom part before she we i even wrote bully but i kind of wrote bully like in an hour and then i threw it into production and i threw mom aside and didn't i mean uh the god thing and so then uh uh she did bully and she nailed it and then i started watching god auditions i didn't even watch them and i watched her do that and at the end of the audition she says you want to get some donuts and it was eerie because the whole donut thing in the bully scene and uh so i said [ __ ] it i'm gonna give her the part but i never thought i'd watch that's weird a little upsetting you know when i was thinking about what i was going to ask you about the show i was working out questions in my mind and i realized that i didn't even know how to phrase stuff because you so in that scene where you such and such or you know do i say you do i say like how what do you think what do you how do you think of that character well i mean to me i none of these things have ever happened to me i never broke into a church and dragged jesus off the cross and caressed him lovingly that never happened but i was scared to [ __ ] by the catholic church i was i was i when i was a kid and they taught you about jesus they taught you that those details they made it as gruesome as they could because that was the idea was to impart the passion that's the whole point of it you tell kids this every detail of it is remember it's a story when you think about it such an old story but they tell you every detail they tell you the amount of times that each thing was done to them and everything so and then you did it what's that yeah and then it was your fault i mean it's not that simple but they actually do tell that simply to children and that's when the [ __ ] goes in they don't tell you it's not like you know when they teach american history and they tell you columbus discovered america and then they started telling you well he didn't it's not he didn't really it's all right there were vikings already and that's we why'd you ever teach me just because it's easier to say that and then we tell you this part but with jesus they just tell you you're bad and he was sent here and this is what happened and all that stuff so yeah why it's me up there but it's it's autobiographical fiction i call it sometimes because it's like it's it's the way i would act in those situations but i'm being myself mostly although i let myself make huge terrible mistakes that i wouldn't make in real life um and i let myself have worse judgment than i have in real life because it's it's more entertaining and i'd rather take it on myself than to like shine a light on other people who i think are bad that's a boring thing to do so i'd rather i'd rather take on the bad behavior and uh and show it that way yeah another thing i think you get an accentuated sense of from those uh clips is a thing that you do in the show where two it has these two kind of opposite hallmarks which is there's this very verite realistic way that the show's presented and it's also they're elements of complete surreality um i i i i i'm just wondering first you know going back to the pilot the the helicopter at the the end of the date um what does what does this bring to the what is having these bizarre elements yeah i mean that's a scene where i'm like on a very relatably bad date with a girl everything's going wrong and i'm just i'm an ill fit to going out with a young woman i'm not sure how i got the date to begin with uh but uh then at the end i i make this terrible decision to try to kiss her after chewing her out i get this weird signal in my head that hey she wants me and i start leaning in to kiss her and she's so reviled that she runs into already waiting and running helicopter that takes her you know away uh i don't know made sense to me yes it did it just feels it just felt right it felt like something that ought to happen and uh you know i don't know i have a lot of different reasons why i do things i did when we started the when we were getting ready to do the pilot i told blair my line producer i wanted to get a helicopter in the show somewhere and uh i was thinking helicopter i had shot this hbo pilot and she found a really cheap helicopter guy they're usually really expensive but she found a really cheap guy he liked us he like when we did hbo he just enjoyed the time he spent with us so uh i was writing that bit and when i got to the end i said yeah [ __ ] it she gets on a helicopter and uh and i love it it feels right to me when i'm watching the helicopter take off it feels that feels like the way i feel at the end of a lot of dates and uh that's how bad it got that it went that it went to a place that can't possibly really happen yeah that's the way it feels sometimes so these are the kind of choices that i make that i know that some people would go yeah but she took me out of it and then i'll and my answer to it is like okay well you know if enough people say that then i'll get cancelled so there's there's kind of a justice to it you know yeah as long as people like it that you know some people won't i get people email me angry things sometimes that was [ __ ] and they get mad you know if that happens enough i'll i'll stop yeah another thing you've mixed up in the show is that there are elements of the show that are serial or that recur in episode to episode and on the other hand you have two two different moms in two different i mean not obviously just the actress because of the age difference but in character totally different mothers yeah um yes you know so do you think of every episode as just a short film entirely divorced from the others yeah i take it on as each episode has even not only just each episode but each piece inside of each episode has its own goal and uh i don't know i i like to keep uh trying different things and i i think in terms of baseball and boxing a lot uh and for baseball to me this is like there was a picture for the yankees once called orlando hernandez they called him el duque and what made him so hard to hit was that he had many arm angles like that sometimes the ball would come from here sometimes from you just didn't know what the hell and i i don't i sometimes think of my relationship with the audience as an adversarial one like i'm you know i want to keep them off their i don't want them crowding the plate you know you have a fastball and those are jokes but then you have weird sliders and breaking pitches that make people nuts they don't know when they're gonna see what i like putting audiences in that place where they're not sure what the [ __ ] you're doing because when you have them off balance then you hit them with something simple and funny then they they go oh my god i can't believe i laughed because i was always starting to go like i'm not into this anymore so i don't know so to me uh having different mothers yeah i had some feelings about i had the idea of a mother that's totally narcissistic she's really more my dad than my real mother's never been like that but i thought what if i was visited by a mother who was that terrible and uh i have a lot of people in my life that are that narcissistic and so they kind of i kind of i meditated on that with that bit and but this for this to tell this story i wanted to really show what my mom was really like because she that's a conversation in the car is almost exact my mother called me afterwards and said jesus that was like that that was like you had a video camera in our car in my pinto in the 70s it really we really had that conversation not because i tore jesus off the cross just because i because i caught her in not believing it that's what happened in real life i said so when jesus did this and she was like man i don't know i was like wait a minute do you believe in this she's like no and then we have that conversation and and the beauty moment is that then at the end the car doesn't start yeah it seemed like something that had to come from life well no that didn't really happen that was because i didn't want to watch them get in you know drive and i thought it just happened when i was shooting it i was like you know what have the car not start let's do that and i like that and yes people can think that it means there really is a god and he's taken he's made taking this little petty revenge mom like that's how god i love that people think that god is that petty that he's like you just i mean there couldn't be if there is a jesus there couldn't be a worse thing a mother could do than to tell her son you're off the hook none of this happened it's [ __ ] and the idea that jesus is watching he's like you know what you're going to call triple a in a minute if you don't hope you believe in triple a [ __ ] but uh yeah what else is going on [Laughter] can you talk about a little bit about the the deal that you have to do the show because i understand it's you know it's kind of it was kind of an unusual financial arrangement with the effects yeah it's it's i don't think i've ever heard of anybody having the situation that i have right now part of it is because i'm working for cheap uh but that's happened before basically i went into doing the show with a lot of um uh strength negotiating wise because i didn't care if i had the job or not i was that's there's nothing more powerful than just saying no to people you know if you say to somebody please give me this i swear i can do it and here's why they're not it's you're not gonna go in well but if you actually say i don't i don't want to do it i was on the road doing stand up and i was making a lot of money and enjoying my shows so i didn't feel i didn't want to go to los angeles i live with my kids here in new york and the most important part of my life is that i i spend half of every week with my kids and i don't have to work during that time i'm a stay-at-home dad from monday morning till about wednesday thursday afternoon and then i go on the road and do stand up it was perfect and so i went out to la and i did a theater show there and a lot of people came and it did well and then nbc and fox and all these people started throwing offers to me to do a show and they're a lot of money and i started to think well maybe i should do it for the money because uh i could stay home a little bit and the show will never get on the air there's no way i'm getting on the air at nbc but i it's an old that's it's crazy they pay you to fail they pay you a huge amount of money just to sit there and think of an idea and then you tell me the idea and they go nah keep the money though it's a weird system makes no sense anyway this could be too long an answer let me cut right to the chase i went to fx and they uh they said i didn't want to go to fx my manager dave becky who's here somewhere he's also an executive bru you can thank that guy who's raising his hand for the show even existing because uh [Music] i he he made a meeting for me and john uh i'm a hemming because i blanked on his name for a second he's my patron saint now i'm [ __ ] landgraf and i he made a meeting for us and i cancelled it i called fx and said i'm not go i didn't feel like it i don't want to i don't like going to meetings it's boring so i cancelled the meeting at fx and he called me and said what you can't cancel that and i said they don't have any money why the [ __ ] would i want to work there and he said because this guy's really smart and so i met john landgraf and he said we'd like to do a show with you and we have a lot of freedom here um but we could only pay you 200 000 to do the pilot and that's i was being offered like whatever three 400 just to personally have as money by the other networks so i said well okay you're giving me two hundred thousand what's the budget for the show and he said no that's the whole show it's what you get paid and what you spend on the show two hundred thousand dollars and i was like i don't wanna do that and i told him i could do a sketch show for that i could do a little sketch show and he said well how about a sketch show about your life and i was like well that's dumb idea and so i went i went home and then he called me in my house landgraf did and he said look i get it i get what you're doing you want to be charlie sheen that's what you're headed it's funny now because he's naked yelling [ __ ] on the streets and all that stuff but i know why that's just what alcohol does to famous people um but anyway charlie charlie sheen to me with he was saying you want to be a big star and on a big network and and i was getting sick as he was saying it the idea of that but uh he said if you come in i said look give me 200 000 and i'll do this show but you can't i'm not writing it and then sending you a script you have to just give me the money and i'll send you a show a dvd in like three months that's it no between anything i'm not pitching i'm not even telling you what the show's about who's in it how i'm doing it you wire me the money i didn't even want to have because this is the way i figured was that i'm very lazy i'm a lazy person and unless i get excited about something and i thought if i have 200 000 of fx's money in an account then i'll write something so i that's he said i have no problem with that and uh so that's the way we did it he literally wired me two hundred thousand dollars and at one point dave god bless him and my agent were trying to get get it up they're like trying to get it to three or four and then landgraf called me and said do you understand that i can write you a check i can send you 200 000 from my desk but if it's more than that i have to go ask rupert murdoch for the money and then you're gonna have to explain to somebody what the show's about you have to at least tell me what it's about and i said okay keep it at 200. and i won't tell you anything so he sent me 200 000 and i called blair and all the people that i worked with making films here in the city for years and paul kessner my great dp who can shoot for nothing and we decided to shoot on the red and make we just i started piecing the show together not from what it even was about i was like i want to shoot a show that feels like short films that's done with beautiful lenses and then we shoot it you know carefully um like an old film crew i started thinking about the kind of people i would like to see in the show before i had written anything and uh and then i started piecing together little scripts and i ran out and shot one thing and then stopped and then wrote more and i just kind of created it with i just took the money and just threw it at objects and people and i shot way more than i needed i shot like something like three episodes worth of material and uh crunched it down to the pilot and uh gave it to them and they had no idea what they were going to see they just pressed play and they watched it and that's a great trick because usually they have to read the scripts then they do rewrites and they're sick of it but they had no idea what the show was and they watched it and they said yeah let's keep doing it they gave me 300 000 for the series per episode that's it i mean i get paid out of that i get paid writer's guild minimum for the script uh dga minimum for directing um and i pay myself way very little as an editor uh and um that's i just make the show and they don't when we started doing the series um john landgraf said what can you tell you got to tell me something and so i i said uh well let's have a beer and let's talk about it so we just sat and i told him three ideas for the series and i didn't do any of them so i said here's three ideas i may or may not do him he said sounds fine and so that was it every week we would take the money and we'd make shows and also i i had the freedom to spend more on some shows than others some shows are cost half a million bucks some shows cost 150 um depend depending on the subject matter um they didn't know who was in the show i was more able to get interesting actors people like ricky because they didn't know ricky was on the show they just they watched and they go how the [ __ ] did he get ricky gervais that's matthew broderick how the [ __ ] and they just you know so and that was to me that was it's much more fun to me doing the show this way is a lot of pressure it's a huge amount of pressure because if the show stinks if i give them an episode that stinks then i have to do it over again i mean that's the that's the deal that we have they have a right to say yeah we just didn't like that one and then i have to make another one yeah so it's a lot of pressure and also i want to i want to keep that freedom i knew that if two episodes in if the shows were weak they would have come it wasn't a contractual right it was just a verbal agreement it remains a verbal agreement between me and john landgraf that i have that freedom it's not a deal that i have i mean that deal doesn't exist they would never put that on paper that would be i mean it comes out of petty cash yeah it just opens up it's literally my show is so cheap that the advertisers don't know what they're advertising on that's how it's so cheap to pay for that people will advertise on it without knowing what's what's in it you know red stripe beer doesn't give a [ __ ] what i'm doing so but that's i earned that right with every episode if i start sliding downward and the show gets weak in their mind they'll send people and i'll have to i'll have to have every script submitted to them everything that's my contract says that i serve at their pleasure and they have approval over everything but that's not how we do it a couple other things then we'll try to get some you know we'll get some questions from the audience um but related to that you do so much on this show um right direct at it uh et cetera so there's almost something like as much as this looks like a 21st century cable company kind of old-timey tv about it but why do you why do you kill yourself like that on this well it's just so fun i just love it i i love it i like writing by myself because these are all like first drafts really like i i like this show to feel like it's right out of my gut or brain or balls one of the three without going through a process i can tell when i watch television that it's gone through a process and i know the process because i've been there but i i can i think audiences do too even though they don't know they know they're what they're being bullshitted with they know they're watching something that has a system to it and it's not fun because they can see it they can see the the moves now you know and that's because we take scripts in tv shows and we give them to a room full of really good professionals and they perfect the scripts but you can only when you perfect you take them in the same direction as everybody else so i tend to write stuff and then leave it alone and trust the first burst idea of how the dialogue is written and everything and i'll slash and cut it but i don't i don't rewrite a lot but then i meticulously shoot it so i'm taking something that was barely thought through and i'm i execute it as director much more carefully um and i could never do that if i had a writing staff they would never let me do that it would be much harder and also be you know 12 times more expensive in the writing department and as a director i can pay myself [ __ ] and uh i i think i'm worth it so so you know i love it i love i love going to the set every day and getting to shoot this stuff it's so fun and the autonomy just greases the wheels it makes it easy i can write pages while i'm shooting and change stuff or you know the the um the story that you told about uh having the same actress play um your date and mom i think i first heard that because um i think you posted that in response to uh uh was there a review of one of the episodes at the yeah i know i google myself too much i think well you know i'm kind of worried because it's sort of the flip side of that solitary auteur approach that you know you now exist as a creator in this world where there are a zillion opinions out there and you can read every word that's written about you and you actually engage with with um some of you know some of your your critics and and fans um you know what what what what do you get out of that is it yeah it's not a good idea yeah i i really i shut up i shut down my facebook and myspace and all this stuff i used to have because i don't think it's healthy for me to have access i should i'm close to shutting twitter down uh because i say things i shouldn't say on twitter too i can't i just i'm a i have a bad form of tourette's that i can't really resist it's not that's not nice to say because that's a real condition but maybe hey maybe i got it i don't know but uh but uh in that case you know it's really narcissistic sitting there googling your name and ooh somebody who wrote a thing on a blog in turkey about my show i'm gonna see what he has to say it's really gross and i've tried to actually temper it because there was a such a massive amount of uh stuff to read for this show and so i had to actually say stop doing this this is disgusting um but i'm it's you know i'm a comedian i work my my whole life revolves around getting you know feeling the laughs and or the not laughs or feeling the chat it's not all that i need laughs it's like the challenge of getting a laugh or the challenge of getting through a dry spot in a show i'm all about the audience so when you produce this stuff and then just let it go on the air it's nice to it's fascinating to see what people think of your material and the folks that were asking questions about the two moms were intelligent i just enjoyed the conversation it's like i went to a party and they were talking about my show and i was wearing a fake mustache or something over my real mustache and uh and they were having a conversation that was imp compelling to me and i said well i actually know why i did it so i'll tell them because they're because i liked them i liked the people that were talking if somebody had written why did that [ __ ] [ __ ] make two [ __ ] different chicks his mom what a douchebag i would have left it alone because that's not as interesting although maybe i would have answered him too i don't know because you dick had wanted to well in that spirit uh will we go should we should we go to the room and uh oh i guess i have to pick people um let's do the georgetown shirt over oh if you can't see the shirt i'm sorry guy for us back here thanks a lot and thanks for being so generous as a comedian i think we all really appreciate it um two quick questions this kind of intricately exploring your moral core in all these like horrible lapses in morality and everything does that go all the way back to you starting as a comedian you know because you said you started in high school so i was wondering if that was true and then also how did you get into directing and how did you learn about directing and direct you know along the line well uh when i was i started stand up in high school and i didn't care about my moral core what i don't think i have one of those but uh i didn't think about that i just wanted to try to be funny uh several years of that's why it really takes like 20 20 years to make a good comedian because at least for the first 10 or 12 for the first 10 years you're just trying to learn to be funny so you just come up with hey maybe a joke about rocks would be good and you apply your comedy knowledge to rocks and then you try current events for a while and they those come and go and then you're also sort of joining a chorus of hate when you do that and uh so you try all this stuff and none of it some of it works and then you start hating it so after 10 years of learning how to be funny and how to just do the work of being a comedian like just like learning piano it's like if you're learning piano on really shitty pieces but you are getting the skill and then you go through five years or so of reject realizing that you've wasted 10 years talking about nothing to drunks in bars and it's too late to go back and do anything else with your life it's a bad time so then you have five years of just like repeating the [ __ ] you've been doing and not knowing why and then either you bottom out or you go right for a better comedian or you give up or kill yourself or something else comes in and gives you you got something else that you want to talk about so other [ __ ] came to me that i wanted to talk about so i changed in that way i learned how to direct uh i lo worked for local access cable tv station in newton massachusetts where i grew up and i learned how to run video cameras and how to edit uh i shot hockey games for my high school and stuff like that and then i do like little art pieces and i take the cameras home and make my own little funny videos that's kind of where i started and then every time i had any little bit of money from doing stand-up i would make short films i made short films throughout my years this year the short films for me go back to i don't know 89 or something like that and i go to festivals with them it's just something i've always loved i didn't go to film school i didn't go to college um on the aisle here in the red hi um thank you very much for this this is really really um valuable i just want to know what you have to say about censorship in terms of being a stand-up uh you probably had to clean up your act when you did like conan or letterman and stuff and you're someone who's acts is not clean how do you deal with being told all the time you must be clean you must be clean but knowing in your bones that you're not someone who is you know like you're someone who yeah just someone who swears a lot and you know that's your essence or whatever what's your advice well it it's uh it you know it's all about the venue like where you're working is what decides what you get to say i never felt uh i mean i i don't get why we can't all say anything we want on tv i don't nobody's ever explained to me why that isn't illegal i don't get why there's an fcc that can make those rules i don't understand it it doesn't jive with what i understand about america and the first amendment it just doesn't make any sense to me what yeah but let me finish but when you're working for a network the fcc rules aren't usually the the challenge it's every network has a standards and practices person and uh networks that go over the air are the ones that you have to have an fcc thing but cable uh you can say whatever you want but it's the as far as the law but every network has their set of rules because they it's not just you know none of us have a right to be on tv it's not it's their channel i mean they set the [ __ ] thing up they bought a big dish and they have a saddle they have a satellite they launch satellites into space so for them not to have the right to decide what's on it i think it's stupid i think that i it's really boring to me when anybody in tv goes like [ __ ] won't let me do well it's their [ __ ] why can't they enjoy what they put on too and the way they pay for all that [ __ ] is advertising and so they have sort of a every place hires somebody who's there to kind of who just knows where they're going to get in trouble and lose money that's all it's money i mean everything has to be paid for uh anyway when you do conan shows like that it's really it's harder because it's the fcc it's the airwaves and uh it's a game though it's kind of fun i had i had jokes improved by censorship when i was at uh conan i did stand up on the show and i knew the standards guy because i was a writer so i could actually he i did a joke about giuliani at the time who was the mayor of new york and he was angry because somebody threw [ __ ] on a piece on a picture of jesus or so i don't know what it was it was something where somebody made a piece of art that was they smeared elephant [ __ ] on a picture of jesus's mother don't get mad at me if somebody did that somebody did that and giuliani shut the funding down and so and he said people pick on catholics that's the problem is that everybody feels like they can pick on catholics and i had this joke where i said yeah it's true people pick on catholics but that's just because they're wrong about god and it's just a brazen [ __ ] joke so i i wanted to do on conan and the sanders guy said no way so i called him i said i think i should i learned how to argue with standards people i said i think i have a right to say this because he's on the news saying his half so it's an equal time issue and he goes all right but find out how can you say it that's not so offensive i don't want to get phone calls so we talked about it he had this idea he said um what if you sound first of all really sympathetic when you say it's true people do pick on catholics a lot but that's because they're wrong about god like he said if you make it like a sillier turn you show some sympathy and then it's going to be clear you're joking when you say that and i did it and it got a way bigger laugh like it was an improvement so i don't know that was a fun exercise to me it's imma it's an intellectual exercise the the censorship sometimes fx is very different they don't it i don't understand how they're letting me do this [ __ ] i don't i don't understand it when i handed in the god episode that's the one i was the most worried about because it was barely funny and it was insane and it's and i'd say this [ __ ] about jesus i mean it's crazy usually jesus and the church is the one place you can't touch on television it's the one place where no standards person will let you [ __ ] around and i was worried about that episode and i handed it in it was one of the last ones and nobody called me usually they call me right after they watch it nobody called and i got really scared because every single episode up until then they'd call me right and i knew they'd watched it i knew literally they watched it on a server that i control and i know when it's been watched i know it's i'm crazy so so i knew they watched it and nobody called me and then i'm waiting and then the next day i write my the one guy i have their executives very sympathetic and i wrote them i said hey did you like it no answer and then i called him and he didn't call me back and i was getting really upset and then i got a call i got an email from him saying you must call me this instant and i was like this is it's over because of jesus so i called him and he said uh in 20 minutes uh we're gonna announce that your show's picked up for a second season and i was like what the [ __ ] are you like i wasn't even thinking about that or expecting it or i really thought we were probably gonna get cancelled and i was like what and he said yeah just don't tell anybody you have 20 minutes you have to keep a secret and you hung up on me and then i called him back and i said wait a minute what about the god episode and he goes oh it's great don't touch it it's great that's great no notes we love it so and i did we standards and i had some issues with the god episode but i think she helped it too she's a there's a woman there and she's brilliant she's very smart and her goal is to keep the show as irreverent as possible by keeping it away from any place where it's gonna get it because if i piss off somebody enough they're gonna you know it takes one person to go then yeah and then the party's over so oh it's up to him uh uh on the aisle and back uh yeah paul you're right next to me um when did you know you were a good comic oh jeez um he's still got the mic like he's ready with more um no i i don't know i uh when i first did it i bombed really bad i was so out of sorts it was the worst thing i'd ever that had ever happened to me the very first time i did it and i did it a second time just because i wanted to know if it was really that bad if it was just a bad night and it was worse and so that was when i was in high school and then i didn't do it again for almost a year and then i went to this weird offbeat place in cambridge massachusetts that was just fun weird it was a off-the-wall cinema it was a place where you would watch like uh dada films and eat carrot cake and they did stand-up comedy midnight on saturdays so i went to the show and it was really weird shows strange trippy comedians and i tried it there and i had a really great set that was my third time on stage and i thought i can do this and then i bombed several times after that but i didn't care because like that one set really got the hook in me so that's i i didn't know if i was good at i just thought i have i have a way that this is something i could do that i enjoy people laughed you know those 14 people in that club were responsible for a lot because if i'd bombed that third time i probably would have i probably wouldn't be alive at all i don't think i had a shot at anything else really uh let's see uh uh white shirt in the center there i was wondering if you would comment about your time with the dana carvey show uh talk about any creative process or anecdotes that you have from that and secondly uh the way that that show was handled did that impact what you fight for with creative control or what sort of impact that had yeah a little bit i mean that show was a really difficult time for me it was bad i mean i hated it and it's a good show but i had a hard time dana was uh you know hot coming out of snl and abc gave him a show um and said we want you to be edgy and irreverent and be really out there and then uh while we were starting to produce the show abc was bought by disney like literally in the middle of our pre-production and then they just a whole different people group of people came and said uh yeah they put dane on the cover of time tv guide with uh or kermit the frog with his arm around cormorant the frog and he never posed for that picture dana was furious to see himself you know with his arm around kermit the frog you know like him and kermit were at the china club and then somebody came over and oh yeah and uh that was it the show had such a uh you know it was very everything we did made somebody mad but i learned did learn from that what one thing i learned was that there wasn't any need for us to be on we're on prime time television the show was like at nine o'clock at night on abc it was just a mistake those people didn't want to see us and i read letters like handwritten letters by people there was no email then you got handwritten letters from old ladies saying you hurt my feelings and you know i just i i learned from that kind of like you gotta go where you're wanted you know so i'm on fx and it's you know they had i remember when i was trying to find while the line was on fx there was i was watching the shield and there is a scene where a woman has been raped and murdered and somebody says oh and he ejaculated on her stomach and then they snap zoom in to a pool of jizz on a deadly on a dead lady's stomach and a friend of mine vernon chapman who's a great comedy guy he said you should cause we're not allowed to show boobs on the show he said you should have a shot of a woman who's naked and cover her boobs with the jizz on the stomach of a dead lady like this is okay beautiful life-giving breasts are not okay the mother's milk gorgeous michelangelo made us cry when he painted them not okay jizz on the stomach of a dead woman totally why are you even asking so so when i me that's so that that's i i should be on a network that lets you do that i should be i should not this show should never be on anywhere else if i got some weird call from an nbc saying we wanted i'd say no you're [ __ ] wrong you people watch your network don't want this it's not fair to them so i kind of learned that from dana carvey that was a hard show to work on though it was just a lot of hours i was there all night every night i was i cried like a lot on that show like i wept like a baby from exhaustion and just pressure it was hard when i was in my 20s i was like 25 years old so it was a lot and i was the head writer there's a lot of a lot of pressure i'm glad i did it it's a huge education um young lady are the scenes with the uh other comics improvised or is it totally scripted like with nick apollo the the the poker scene was scripted uh as far as once we start really talking about uh gay sex and asking those questions and also the thing of all the stuff most of the stuff of me talking about packing dicks into his mother's ass was it's about a half script and a half once we shot the scene once it was a really long day because we shot the scene once like scripted and then i gave everybody a shot at screwing around and improvising and then we all started getting a little punchy and everybody started saying funny [ __ ] about wearing flip-flops and stuff and then we kept shooting to get that and then everyone was so warmed up that i was like guys can i just have the scene as written all over again on everybody's close-up and they're like [ __ ] and i made them do that everybody's happy because the scene came out good but it was a lot it was both we kept shifting from scripted to um to some improvised i don't usually do much improving in uh this show because we shoot it like cinema we shoot it you know with a lot of coverage and we pick lenses carefully so it's kind of if you improvise once you kind of have to but this scene ended up cutting together nicely because uh we didn't follow the script and i had the camera kept kind of going around this spiral circle that's kind of the way we shot it in this weird spiral and i like that we could catch sometimes in the middle of a move and some some of the dialogue is clipped um i liked that so that's how we did that one um stripes in front here um in your mind do you have a filter between topically like what is good for stand up and what is good for the show are there things in the show topics or scenes that you would want to do stand up but just don't work or how do you differentiate for yourself well that's one thing i love about doing this show is that it all comes from the same place like i kind of think of every episode as a stand-up set and some things are said with my face and some are said with a lot of people's faces and uh the subjects cling together in about as much as they do on stage that i'll talk about something and sometimes i'll i'll talk about something else tangentially or i'll just suddenly just change the subject because i feel like it so the show does that sometimes sometimes it's following a line and sometimes it just goes uh anyway you get it here's this now so uh every but it's it's a great for me it's great because every time i have an idea of an area to talk to do on the show i can just make that choice like if it's not coming together as stand-up material oh well maybe i should be showing this so it's kind of 50 50. i mean it's whatever it depends on the subject the gay thing the the poker thing that was a real conversation i had with that comedian uh years ago and i thought i should tell that story on stage but then i thought i'm not going to stand there and tell that story it was his story and i actually got him to you know that's the real guy he's just a comedian from here in new york so that was one one thing where i thought about it on stage first and then thought i'd shoot it all right we got time for one more i think i hate this god like power sorry everybody um right right right in the center nobody over there nobody over there asked anything i mean they want to uh all right uh right next to you there hi oh my voice is horrible on this uh i'm a film production student and um what is the actually wrote a script and based it off you and your show and uh because i like your tone and uh what is the best advice you can give for like a student and like attitude when you're doing that because you kind of say a big few to a lot of people and i like that say you mean i like attitude when you're um when you're yeah when you're in the production which you've done at all and what's the best attitude to really get best attitude in production is really uh really wanting to help a lot uh really wanting to help whoever's show it is uh be really great i mean just i mean i think that's anybody who's doing any job really should want that job to be done really well i mean this is a simple answer but it's really true there's one person really usually that has an idea of how to do something and everybody else should really want i mean it's such a rare and great gift to get a job in show business it's very very it's not you're not going to get one i mean statistically you're you're not so you know it's like when when unemployment is like a two percent they say it's full employment like it's that's how low your odds are that statistically you're not going to get a a job that you really want in show business so if you do holy [ __ ] what if i and the way i would approach it is i want to do everything i can to make myself valuable to these people that's that's when you do it when you're in production and you just see somebody kicking ass and wanting what they do to go well um you just never forget them i mean i have people i've kept around uh for years and years and i just beg there's people that don't want to do this [ __ ] anymore and i beg them to stay on for me that my dp uh paul kessner is a genius but he wants to be on a boat all the time he has a [ __ ] boat and he takes it to the bahamas and [ __ ] and so every time when we got season two he's he's the only one who didn't want to hear it i'm like we got picked up and he's like ah i'm like please get off the [ __ ] boat because he's so eager to make what i see in my head real that's and so that's the way all the way up to the very closest person and then actually when you're the person who's running the thing which is definitely not going to happen to you i'm just trying to impress upon you how if you get there how rare that ex chance is going to be and how important it is to seize it if you get to be the person who gets to run the thing then you have to kind of turn the same attitude on them that you have to enable all those people to do their jobs and and i'm just the directorial department i'm also the writing department in the editorial department um and the elite actor but but i just run those parts of the show everybody else has to i have to know what they do i know what everybody does because i was an intern i mean i i i carried camera cases i did everything and i hung lights in studios so i know everything that goes on so i know what i'm asking people to do i know what i'm asking them to take on i think it's arrogant to think that you can just force your will on a crew of people it's you you've got to be a human being if you're a director or if you're a sound person when i was shooting pootie tang there was a young chick who was the boo we had a boom operator was this young student who came on for one day and we're all ready to shoot this really intricate shot and she didn't like how she had the boom so she just went wait a minute i'm not ready and everyone was like what the [ __ ] was that because she was being belligerent and shitty and so the person who we replaced her with was a real human being they're just they treated us treated us like human beings everybody just wants to be treated decently if life's too short to be an [ __ ] as an employer or an employee so if everybody yeah if everybody likes the work and everybody wants the show to be as good as possible and everybody treats each other with respect the show is going to be and we have so much fun on this show because we don't have anybody on the set who everyone goes oh jesus i mean it may be me and then there's only one then so you know i the only question i want to answer because everybody asks it is about the middle finger during the opening credits uh i know somebody here wants to ask it so i'm going to answer it during the opening credits of the show some guy flips off the camera it was a young nyu looking kid um spiky hair and just real contrary and he was walking with some real yeah [ __ ] everything type yeah i mean i really i was eating the pizza and i saw them and i was i already thought jesus and they walked by and they were like because they saw a camera and they saw people making a sincere effort at something it was like just offensive to them so one of them went yeah and he flipped off the camera and i remember that moment very well because i was eating the pizza and i watched him flip off the camera and i could tell by the angle that we caught it and i thought that's it when that happened i knew we were gonna be on tv because that was when we were shooting the pilot and it was a test to see if we could get it but for some reason i remember seeing that and thinking that's just meant to be that that's going to be in the opening credits it'll be fuzzy because i [ __ ] know how the camera works it's going to be a little fuzzy because it's out of the depth of field um and and people are going to see it i just knew that was just a sign to me that we would get to be on tv so there is a god there is a god he gave me the finger um all right louis ck thank you very [Applause] much you

Channel: SouthernComfort Productions

Views: 48,830

Rating: 4.9245281 out of 5

Keywords: James, Poniewozik, Louis, C.K., Paley, Center, for, Media, Reserve, Channel, RSRV

Id: uycAOmgEpwE

Length: 54min 39sec (3279 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 02 2020