Seth Rogen has come a long way since his early days playing roles on “Freaks & Geeks” and “Undeclared.” Rogen is now a true multi-hyphenate writer/producer/director/actor, with forthcoming projects that lie across the entire pop-culture spectrum: AMC’s comic book adaptation “Preacher,” R-rated animated comedy “Sausage Party,” video game industry documentary “Console Wars,” and the Hulu series “Future Man,” among many others.
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Rogen’s latest theatrical release is ‘Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising,’ which he co-wrote, produced, and stars in. Following up on the 2014 comedy “Neighbors,” this sequel finds parents Mac and Kelly (Rogen and Rose Byrne) attempting to sell their home as they prepare for the birth of their second daughter. The sale is complicated when a rogue sorority moves in next door, and then gets weird when former frat neighbor Teddy (Zac Efron) teams up with the sorority leaders (played by Chloë Grace Moretz, Kiersey Clemons, and Beanie Feldstein) to create a powerhouse party spot. The fast-paced film is at its best when Rogen, Byrne and Efron are simply riffing off one another, but it also packs plenty of comic commentary about parenting fears and the specific experience of young women starting college.
The Playlist recently spoke to Rogen about making his first live-action sequel (he has provided voice work for the “Kung-Fu Panda” films) and looking at jokes from “Neighbors” in a new light. We also talked about the work that goes into making some creative dreams come true, and tackling the challenge of adapting “Preacher.”
You’ve been talking about doing sequels for a while, at least since “Pineapple Express,” but this is your first real sequel. How did it work out that way?
A lot of the people involved in the movie are in relationships, or are married with kids, and this was a good format for us to tell the types of stories that we were going through. Inherently, a lot of us wanted to work on a movie that was about parenting and fears of being a bad parent. The idea of a quarter-life crisis was something fascinating to us, too. Evan and I had written a movie years ago about a guy who goes through one. We realized the “Neighbors universe” if you will [Rogen laughs big here] was a good way for us to tell a lot of the emotional stories we were interested in, with characters we knew people liked, and that we like.
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Some of the film’s best scenes are built around character work between you, Rose Byrne, and Zac Efron. Is your rapport a natural outgrowth of the last movie?
I think so, and it helps when the characters are very well defined and their stories make sense — it makes that much easier. You know what your role is in the joke of the scene. For me and Rose, it’s often the same joke, which is a funny one, which is that we’re generally mind-blowingly united in every stupid idea we come up with. It’s also just them as actors; they’re really great. Zac’s performance is so funny and committed to me, it’s sad and weird. And Rose is endlessly entertaining. And she acts like she’s my wife, which is very impressive!
This film explores gender imbalances in the greek system, and larger culture. Was that a starting point for the script?
It kind of grew out of the idea that [the characters] had a daughter and were going to have another one. We like the idea of being afraid of being bad parents and one day not being able to relate to our own daughters. That’s where the idea came from, that a group of sorority girls would be a metaphor for a bunch of young women that we are in no way able to relate to, very much like in real life.
Then, as we were looking into it, the idea was “a sorority will move in next door and they’ll party all the time.” Someone who worked in our office who was in a sorority said “they actually aren’t allowed to party.” We looked it up, and lo and behold it’s true. So that added a funny layer of making them very just in their motivation, which further calls into question whether or not we’re good parents, as we’re specifically subverting rights that would one day benefit our own children.
And that’s where you start to make Zac’s character reexamine his own past, and the sexist aspects of the parties that are common to so many college movies.
Yeah, the idea of reframing some of the stuff we did in the first movie, through the lens of female characters, became an interesting thing to us once we realized it would be incredibly sexist and uncomfortable for women in those situations.
Is there a level of self-examination in there?
For sure! One-hundred per cent. Looking at some of those parties and situations… it was all reframed through the information that women had no choice but to go to those parties. That’s what was interesting. What we didn’t understand when we were making the first movie was that if they wanted to go to a party, you had to go to that party, they couldn’t throw their own. That reframed everything in retrospect. Like, “Oh, they might not even want to be at those parties!”