Anna Kendrick, Will Reiser and Seth Rogen at the 2011 BFI London Film Festival
“I wish it was more phallic,” said Seth Rogen, referring to his microphone at the start of a YouTube-sponsored Q&A at this year’s London Film Festival. It’s the phenomenon that occurs whenever you put a dude comedian on stage in front of an audience—they just end up talking about penises.
The London Film Festival kicked off its 55th year year with 360, directed by the Brazilian Fernando Meirelles (City of God) and starring Jude Law, Anthony Hopkins and Rachel Weisz. Other highlights include the two George Clooney movies, The Ides of March, which he directed himself and The Descendants, which is Alexander Payne’s first film since Sideways in 2004. Elsewhere, British filmmaker Steve McQueen’s Shame and Canadian David Cronenberg’s psychoanalytic drama A Dangerous Method are receiving serious buzz due to actor Michael Fassbender, who plays a sex addict in the former and Carl Jung in the latter. The two-week festival closes on Oct. 27 with Deep Blue Sea, featuring Rachel Weisz, Tom Hiddleston and Simon Russell Beale in Terence Davies’ adaptation of Terrence Rattigan’s play about a postwar love triangle.
At Friday night’s event, Rogen and Will Reiser—writer of the autobiographical cancer comedy 50/50 which screened at the fest—chronicled the film’s backstory. The two met in 2003 as writers on the HBO version of British TV smash hit Da Ali G Show. By the time Reiser was diagnosed with cancer in his back and underwent surgery to remove the tumor (similar to the type his Joseph Gordon Levitt character contracts in the film), Rogen had become one of his closest friends. They decided to turn life into comedy and bounced around ideas for a screenplay. As Reiser put it, there was “no movie we could reference what we were going through,” apart from The Bucket List, which they didn’t care for (to put it mildly). Rogen was acutely aware of how difficult it would be to successfully pull off a movie of this sort: “A bad cancer comedy might be the worst comedy ever made.”
Plenty of the questions submitted were from YouTube users (with people voting online to decide the 10 best), with the remainder coming from the audience and LFF host Edith Bowman. Perhaps predictably, many of the inquiries wondered how true to life the movie was. “Was your girlfriend as much of a bitch?” asked Bowman, referring to the character played by Bryce Dallas Howard. “Next question,” shot back Reiser.
Despite some emotional moments—at one point, an audience member described his current battle with cancer—Rogen and Reiser spent most of the evening riffing off each other like old friends do. One memorable exchange revolved around how they used Reiser’s illness to cut the movie theater line when Batman Begins came out. “And they let us in for free,” remarked Rogen. “For us, that’s the equivalent of getting laid,” added Reiser before Rogen’s pay off: “And it lasted longer.” Rogen said if he could have cast anyone else to play himself he would have chosen “slim Jonah Hill. I deserve it.”
A spirited defense of their favorite comedies was a sketch in its own right. Rogen went with Ghostbusters while Reiser took the more esoteric choice of Harry & Tonto, a 1974 film about a retired New Yorker who crosses the country with his cat. “I can’t believe you haven’t seen it!” exclaimed Reiser. “I can!” came the response.
Reiser discussed future plans—HBO project The Baghdad Country Club, a comedy set in the Green Zone, sounds intriguing—and rejected the possibility of a 50/50 sequel because the ending was definitive enough to not warrant a follow up. But he reassured the audience that the film is “being corrected to 3D and it will be good.” Cancer in three dimensions? That’s a real riot.