Judd Apatow

With his new Netflix comedy 'The Bubble,' director Judd Apatow reflects our pandemic life on screen, from uncomfortable masks to TikTok dance moves.

“The hard part was we had to train all the actors,” Judd Apatow says. TikTok blew up during the COVID era and its popularity is reflected in Krystal Kris (played by Apatow’s daughter Iris), a social-media phenomenon added to the “Cliff Beasts 6” cast who rounds up her fellow actors for an epic dance video in their hotel. The actors in the film have to endure various quarantine and lockdown periods, with most of them going a little stir crazy. So all of the face-covering takes away one of the elements that allows everyone to be in a good mood.” “The part of it that I thought we could talk about was isolation, lockdowns, trying to continue to work and be a normal person when the circumstances, everything, have so completely changed.” So my main intention was to try to create the movie I wish was out there," says Apatow, who for the movie-within-the-movie was able to work with green screens and computer-generated dinosaurs after a career mostly avoiding such things.

The Bubble, the latest film from Judd Apatow, is a shaggy and toothless look at celebrity egos and pandemic-era filmmaking.

Apatow has always been a fan of improvisation, but with The Bubble, that reliance on letting the actors go free hits its breaking point. But with The Bubble, Apatow is at his least interesting as a comedy writer, with pandemic jokes that already feel exhausted, and parodies of showbiz that are fairly obvious. On that note, some of The Bubble’s best moments are when Apatow does let these actors play off each other, but puts a structure in place. That, however, is not the case with The Bubble, Apatow’s latest comedy, in which he indulges his worst impulses in a film that becomes little more than a collection of bits and ideas that don’t tie together in a worthwhile way. As the COVID-19 pandemic looms over film productions, The Bubble has the stars of the 23rd biggest action franchise of all time—Cliff Beasts—reuniting for the sixth installment. Each member of The Bubble’s cast is a fairly one-note joke, each a shallow caricature of fairly broad celebrity type.

While visiting The Tonight Show, filmmaker Judd Apatow shared the gripe he has about being pals with Paul Rudd. Read his major complaint about the actor ...

To further prove his point, Jimmy showed a photo of Judd and Paul from 10 years ago. Even worse, the fact that Paul doesn't appear any older is preventing Judd from making a follow-up to his 2012 film This is 40. "You know what the worst part about being friends with Paul Rudd, as the guy who doesn't age?

The filmmaker explains how Hollywood problems inspired his latest satire.

I was a big fan of “The Worst Person in the World,” a very special movie. There was always a lot of Sidney Lumet in Ben, and I really appreciate that he made a decision to fully engage that side of himself. We have a great script with Tig Notaro that we’re trying to get made this year, as well as a script with the Lucas brothers. But he didn’t live in the time of algorithms and the way that a lot of these platforms try to get you addicted to a certain negative type of information to keep you on the platform longer. I went to see “The Batman” and had the best time. There’s something meta about putting that into a movie with Netflix. What is your feeling about the transition to streaming? If I make a movie for theaters and it costs $10 to see, and 10 million people see it, it makes $100 million and that’s a giant hit. But the issue usually is that no matter what you say, a third of the country violently disagrees with you. He said that the job of the comedian is to find out what the line is, step over it, and make the audience glad that they did. Judd Apatow: I really wasn’t thinking much about the “Jurassic World” experience other than I wanted to do a two-location movie for safety and I thought that, if half the movie takes place in a hotel and half of it takes place in a green screen stage, then I could have a smaller crew and hopefully can make it very safe for everyone. I was mainly interested in an exaggerated version of people having nervous breakdowns in isolation similar to the kind that I was having in my own home. It doesn’t take much scrutiny to recognize some similarities with the real-life scenario that faced the production of “Jurassic World Dominion” in 2020, when the shoot shut down and then resumed production with COVID restrictions in place.

According to The Hollywood Reporter and their sources, The Bubble takes inspiration for the yet unreleased Jurassic World: Dominion, which saw its cast stuck in ...

Dominion has already wrapped so we can expect a happy ending to The Bubble as well. Netflix insiders, however, say the movie has no connection to Dominion, again according to THR. NEW YORK CITY (KUSI) – Judd Apatow is an American film director, screenwriter, producer and comedian.