Mr. Apatow, 46, has built a career out of softer fare, from the
high school misfits of “Freaks and Geeks” to Seth Rogen’s bumbling journey
toward fatherhood in “Knocked
Up,” that has honed a reputation
for creating so-called man-boys who resist growing up. It’s a characterization
he disagrees with and resents — “In most of my movies, there’s an equal
component of what female characters are up against in their lives,” he said —
and one he has chipped away at in recent years by serving as an executive
producer of Lena Dunham’s HBO show, “Girls,” and producing “Bridesmaids,” which grossed $288 million worldwide.
Both Ms. Schumer and Mr. Apatow said their approaches were not all that
different. “We find the same things funny,” Ms. Schumer said.
“And
we both appreciate brutally honest comedy,” Mr. Apatow said.
The
pair met two years ago, after Mr. Apatow heard Ms. Schumer on Howard Stern’s
show while idling in Los Angeles traffic and was struck, he said, by her warmth
and biting humor. Always on the lookout for funny people who can tell
interesting tales, he contacted her to brainstorm on a potential script.
They
abandoned her original idea — they declined to divulge what it was — and came
up with a story plumbed heavily from Ms. Schumer’s life, about a
commitment-averse woman trying to get past her self-sabotaging ways. In other
words, pitch-perfect Apatow fare.
“Most
people aren’t that funny — there’s only a few that take it to a higher place,”
Mr. Apatow said one recent morning on the “Trainwreck” set in Douglas Manor in
northeastern Queens. “She’s insanely funny, and she has stories to tell.”
Working on the script, he said, he pushed Ms. Schumer to dig into her
vulnerabilities, “almost like a therapist thing.” He said he had never worked
with anyone who wrote so quickly.
Ms. Schumer said that as her friendship with Mr. Apatow grew —
she calls him her “fairy godfather” — her trust in him deepened as well. “I’m
not afraid he’s going to slam the door shut,” she said, “We’re in this
together.”
Bill
Hader, the “Saturday Night Live” alumnus who plays Ms. Schumer’s would-be Mr.
Right in “Trainwreck,” described the partnership between the comedian and the
director as “the perfect melding.”
“Judd’s
interested in comedy and sadness and people self-sabotaging and the messiness
of life,” he said, “and Amy is interested in the same.”
One
morning on the set, Ms. Schumer was sitting in a director’s chair, exquisitely
made up, blond hair flowing, sipping a decaffeinated Starbucks concoction
because caffeine makes her “go nuts.” She was complaining about her microphone
pack, which, she revealed with a hoist of her dress, was taped to her upper
thigh. “It’s digging into my vagina,” she groused.
A
neighbor kept appearing in his driveway, saying he was waiting for friends and
refusing to get out of the shot. Ms. Schumer shut him down as she would a
heckler. “Really — do you really have friends?” she hollered. He disappeared
into his house.
Microphone
box and pesky neighbor aside, Ms. Schumer was the picture of equipoise.
“I’ve
acted in a lot of films where the lead wrote the movie,” Mr. Hader said. “She’s
definitely the calmest.”
Ms.
Schumer attributed her relaxed demeanor partly to the magnitude of resources
for the production. A multimillion-dollar movie crawling with experienced crew
members and overseen by a seasoned director, “Trainwreck” is starkly different
from her own show, which is produced at a breakneck pace by a small team on a
fraction of the budget.
“Making
this feels like a vacation,” Ms. Schumer said of the film. “I’m the most
relaxed I’ve been in 10 years.”
A
former volleyball player at her Long Island high school, she has approached the
filming with an athlete’s discipline: getting a good night’s sleep, abstaining
from alcohol (except on Fridays) and keeping her comedy muscles nimble by doing
stand-up on the weekends.
She
is also a trained actress: After appearing in plays while growing up, she
earned a degree in theater from Towson University in Maryland and studied for
two years with the William Esper
Studio in New York. Her acting
chops reveal themselves in her television skits and, her co-stars say, on the
set. Mr. Hader said that in one scene, she left onlookers sniffling when her
character delivered a eulogy.
With
less than two weeks left in the film’s shooting schedule, Ms. Schumer said she
was already mourning the end. The movie’s release is set for next summer, and
however it is received, Mr. Apatow said he feels that he caught her at the
perfect time.
“There’s
a moment early in someone’s career where they will kill and die for what
they’re writing about,” he said. “That’s why sometimes these first movies are
the best ones. Because people never have this level of commitment again.”
