It seems like Franco can do anything. He probably knows how to garden and change tires and cook.
Evan Goldberg: I bet you anything he can’t cook! [laughs] I will bet any amount of money. I bet he can’t even use a microwave.
There’s a lot of jokes that play on the public persona of each character, how and when did you determine the path of each person? How did you pick each character to end up in their respective spots?
Seth Rogen: Some of it we went into it with, and the guys were really instrumental themselves in coming up with a lot of it. We always knew Jonah would get raped by a demon and possessed, but that’s what we wanted to have happen.
Evan Goldberg: Not in the context of the movie, just in life.
Seth Rogen: We were very honest with Jonah, we told him “this is where we want it to end, and worked backwards.” Originally in the script we had it that Jonah was very obviously an asshole from the beginning, so it was just comeuppance. He had the idea, actually, he thought, what if this character was the kind of guy where you can’t tell if he’s an asshole or not? You could make the case that he’s really nice, and you could also make the case that he’s f**king with everybody he encounters. That at least added another level to it. The guys themselves had a lot of input I think because they were playing themselves. They didn’t care if they played bad versions, they just wanted to be interesting bad versions.
Evan Goldberg: Franco added the idea that he was in love with Seth, which would have been a demented thing for Seth to have written.
Seth Rogen: Yeah, exactly, you can’t pitch that as the filmmaker. [laughs]
So, Danny’s playing against his own self? I assume he’s even more of a homicidal cannibal in real life, no?
Seth Rogen: [Laughs] Yeah, in real life, Danny’s like the nicest guy.
Evan Goldberg: Danny’s the funniest when it comes to public perception. Everyone’s got it wrong. He crafted Kenny Powers off of people he didn’t like.
Seth Rogen: And now it’s who he’s associated with.
So where’s the biggest disparity between fact and fiction, Michael Cera or Danny McBride?
Evan Goldberg: Probably Michael Cera. I don’t know though, Danny’s character is really far from him.
Seth Rogen: Michael does own that windbreaker though, so that brings it closer.
When you settled on doing Revelation, the biblical end of the world, was that because of opportunity, the number of things you could do with it, or why did you end up using that?
Seth Rogen: We just thought it was funny.
Evan Goldberg: People actually think that as Jews, we’re going to be stuck here and that’s going to happen. We started talking about what would we do if that happened, ’cause they don’t say what would happen to all of these people left behind. What happens to all these Jews? It kind of started from like a Jewish thing. And the answer is you get f**ked.
Seth Rogen: The original draft of the script said “based on the book by God.” We didn’t send it out like that. We should have though. [laughs] It was the craziest part of the movie and it was honestly the part that we expected to get the most resistance on. We thought if the studio has one thing they’ll fight us on, it’s the fact that we’re tackling religion head on. They never said anything about that though. They didn’t care about that at all. It was all about whether or not we should play ourselves, that was every conversation we had with them.
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