- Please welcome (audience cheers)
a true pioneer, Paul Feig! (audience applauds)
(upbeat music) (audience cheers)
- Yes, come on, come on.
I'm gonna turn.
- My favorite.
- Yes.
Hey, everybody.
- Oh, Paul, thank you so much
for gracing us with your presence.
- Oh, Drew, please, thank you for having me
'cause it's never more exciting
when a director's on a show, (chuckles) I find.
- [Drew] Well-
- 'Cause people don't know what we do, really, sometimes.
- Well, I do.
- Thank you so much.
- I wouldn't mind, if you wouldn't mind,
if we could actually take a little quick look
at some of your body of work.
Will you do me a favor
and play my favorite game, "Behind the Scenes," with me?
- I would be honored to.
- Ladies and gentlemen, it's "Behind the Scenes!"
- Here we go. (audience cheers)
(lighthearted music)
- Okay, "Bridesmaids."
- (laughs) Oh, my gosh.
So many great things happened.
You know the scene where,
the showdown between Helen and Annie,
basically with the Jordan almonds and all that,
(Drew laughs)
and the sweaty face.
Well, the way that that was achieved
was Kristen Wiig just said,
"Give me a little can of like evian spray water.
So, "Okay."
So she would do a line and she would just spray her face.
And then she'd do another line,
she would spray her face again, and do another, and spray.
So she'd just gets sweatier and sweatier and sweatier.
But that was all Kristen just going, like,
"I'm gonna use this little can of water."
- All right, give it to me for "The Heat,"
my favorite movie!
I mean, oh, my God, I love this movie.
I've seen it 25 times. (audience applauds)
- Okay, so there's a montage in the middle
when they're at the bar kinda bonding
for the first time and getting drunk
where they're taping their fingers together
and doing all this stuff.
That was them.
I was literally...
We were just gonna do a bunch of funny stuff.
I didn't even kinda know what it was gonna be.
I said like, "Let's just play around."
And all of a sudden, Melissa goes,
"Can I have a roll of Scotch tape?" (laughs)
I go, "Okay."
So I go off to do something else.
I come back and they've taped their forks onto their hands,
and suddenly, they're taping their noses up with the thing.
(audience laughs)
And I'm just like, "Okay, go."
And we just shot for about
(audience laughs)
a half hour of absolute madness, so.
- Ah, and it makes our lives
all the better. (audience applauds)
Another Melissa McCarthy movie that we all love, "Spy."
Give me a fly-on-the-wall moment
of "Spy." (audience applauds)
- Melissa did a lot of her own stunt work on that moped
when we had that big chase scene.
- [Drew] I saw that.
- Yeah, yeah. - Like, is that true?
- Yeah, she did a lot of that riding around.
There were some harder stunts we had somebody else do,
but mostly, it was her,
but that's how she did it. (audience applauds)
- Okay, good.
Melissa McCarthy once again overcomes all odds
and like can do anything possible.
Okay, "A Simple Favor."
- [Paul] Yes.
- I told you I'm in love with Blake Lively.
- Aren't we all? - And you told me a fun fact
about her wardrobe, actually, in that movie.
- Yeah, well, we were trying to figure out
what her look was gonna be.
And I want her to be very like this powerful person.
And Blake just looked over at me,
and she goes like, "I wanna dress like you."
'Cause normally, I have a three-piece suit.
I only have a two-piece on today.
But I was like, "Well, I would be honored if you would."
And she looks spectacular in the movie, so.
- Okay, finally, "Freaks and Geeks."
- The character of Sam Weir, played by John Francis Daley,
is based on me.
It's basically, that's what I wrote it for.
But I was a really tall kid and all my bullies were short.
And so when we were trying to cast it, I kept,
I had all these like tall kids that we'd liked,
but they weren't quite right.
And then we finally came to New York
and met with John Francis Daley who was about this tall
and he looked like he was 12, but he was so good
that I ended up saying, okay, we'll rewrite it
so he's not a big, tall kid.
He's just this, a normal-sized kid
who gets bullied by kids his size.
So it was supposed to be me, but it's much better as him.
- Now, is there a story
that actually your first project,
there's something like you funded it-
- [Paul] (chuckles) Yeah.
- But it didn't go the way you planned?
- Well, I used to be an actor,
and I was on "Sabrina the Teenage Witch"
in the first season as Mr. Pool, the biology, yeah.
(audience applauds)
Thank you. (chuckles)
- That contributes a lot of things about why-
- Mitosis is, there you go.
If you know the show, then everybody knows that phrase.
(laughs) But so I did the first season.
And then I always wanted to make a movie on my own.
So I wrote a movie that could be cheap.
And so I took all my money, $35,000 at the time,
put it into this,
thinking I was gonna come back the next season,
and then get more money.
And then they called me up after I finished my movie
and said, "Oh, we're writing you out of the show." (laughs)
So I basically bankrupted my family (chuckles)
to make this movie. - But, okay,
so that's not ideal.
- No.
(Paul and audience laughing)
- But something happened because of that.
You met someone.
- Well, I...
Judd Apatow was an old friend of mine,
and we used to be stand-up comedians together
back in the '80s.
And he saw the movie and really liked it.
And he had just made a deal with DreamWorks
'cause he was coming off of "The Larry Sanders Show,"
and said, "If you ever have an idea for a TV show,
let me know."
Well, it was in that year
when I was out promoting this movie
that I never got released on a college tour,
I wrote the script for "Freaks and Geeks,"
and then sent it to Judd, and we got it made.
(upbeat pop music)