By Fred Topel | Image property of Universal Pictures.
It's good to be friends with Judd Apatow right now. He's producing movies and looking for material. Jason Segal is another former Freaks and Geeks alum with his own script. This summer, he starred in the film of his own Forgetting Sarah Marshall.
Forgetting Sarah Marshall
"It’s been a dream come true which I know sounds cliché but I can’t believe it," said Segal. "What I like more than hearing the words I’ve written out loud is hearing stuff I‘ve written improved by the actors. These guys are just amazing. I got really, really lucky. Kristen [Bell] and Mila [Kunis] couldn’t be better. This guy Russell Brand is going to be a huge star. He’s a genius so I’m surrounded by great people."
The film stars Segal as a boy trying to get over his celebrity ex, Sarah Marshall (Bell). On vacation in Hawaii, he meets a woman (Kunis) also prone to bad relationships. The setting was always Segal's idea.
"My first thought was where is a fun place to shoot a movie? It was really fun to write it there too. As soon as I sold the pitch, I rented a house in Hawaii for a month and went and finished it out there. It was awesome."
Forgetting Sarah Marshall
Forgetting Sarah Marshall
Forgetting Sarah Marshall
This wasn't Segal's lifelong project like Superbad. It came to him in a flurry more recently. "It all happened very quickly over the past couple years, the idea, the kernel sort of came in my mind. I wrote the first 20 pages earlier, like a year and a half ago. And then I finished the rest once I went to Hawaii which was several months later. But no, it’s all just as I have terrible dates, more ideas come. That’s basically how it happened."
Segal likes to call it a romantic disaster comedy, to bridge the two genres together. "Well, unlike your typical romantic comedy, it’s not just a relationship unfolding. It’s a guy having to deal with literally his worst nightmare while all that’s going on, so I think there’s an extra added element of it being your worst nightmare which a lot of romantic comedies don’t have. I show up in Hawaii to clear my head and my ex-girlfriend, Sarah Marshall, is there with her new boyfriend. That’s the plot of the movie."
Forgetting Sarah Marshall opens to theaters on May 30th, 2008.
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