Seth Rogen & His Hollywood Pals Are The New Brat Pack

"Honestly, if you'd asked me a few years ago if I was going to direct a movie, there's a good chance I would've said 'no',” admits Seth Rogen. The 31-year-old Canadian funnyman has just made his directorial debut with This Is The End, an apocalyptic comedy he co-helmed with his longtime creative collaborateur Evan Goldberg. “We're not big planners. We just take it as it comes, and things just kind of happen,” Rogen adds; these things soon to include The Interview, another co-directed flick to be filmed later in 2013, in which Rogen and James Franco play entertainment journalists enlisted by the CIA to kill North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.

Rogen and Goldberg were childhood friends who've been working together “literally since we were 13 years old”. That's when, after meeting at a bar mitzvah, they wrote the first, proto draft for what would eventually, over a decade later, turn into 2007's Superbad. “We've had all the creative arguments you can have by now,” Rogen says, of their partnership.

Their friendship is at the core of This Is The End, an apocalyptic horror-comedy-satire which finds Rogen and Jay Baruchel playing themselves – or, in the case of Baruchel, a stand-in for Goldberg – and exploring struggles in their friendship amidst the end of the world. With a parade of celebrities all too happy to play themselves – the principle cast is Rogen, Baruchel, Franco, Jonah Hill, Danny McBride and Craig Robinson, and there are cameos from Emma Watson, Channing Tatum, Aziz Ansari, Kevin Hill, Jason Segel, Rihanna, and probably more I'm forgetting – the film becomes about Baruchel's dislike of Los Angeles, celebrity culture, and Rogen's new, non-Canadian, non-stoner friends.

“It's real for us,” says Rogen. “When I moved to LA, I found it hard to adjust, and then when Evan moved here a few years later, he didn't get along that well with a lot of the friends I'd made, and they didn't like him much. If the whole movie is going to be about this emotional idea, we always ask ourself: 'is this something that we really care about?'”

Rogen and Goldberg first explored the idea in a 2006 short film, Jay And Seth Versus The End Of The World, in which Baruchel and Rogen bickered in a closed room, whilst the apocalypse took place outside their apartment. “Our initial thought was: what's the biggest movie we can make for the least time and money?” Rogen laughs (meaning, yes, he lets out that trademark machine-gun-Elmer-Fudd guffaw). The short film marked Rogen's debut, but it never actually screened anywhere. Soon after a trailer was posted online, the rights for the project —and a potential full-length adaptation— were subject to a bidding war.

It took years for the project to eventually come together. Filming began in 2012, a year in which apocalyptic fears were a persistent part of the cultural (and pop-cultura)l climate. “It seems like the world might end!” Rogen yelps. “The weather's weird, climate change, pollution, the Pope quit... these are bad signs.”

The trailer for This Is The End immediately attracted suspicion that Rogen and pals were blowing their resources on a film in which they dick around, play themselves, and ultimately come across as the new scions of Hollywood privilege, making everyone else a party to their vanity project. That was, says Rogen, kind of the point: they thought having the characters play themselves was a way of tackling the perceptions of their ex-Freaks boys directly. “We know that every time we make a movie everyone thinks that anyway,” Rogen offers, “so we're attacking that head on; that's part of the joke of the movie, that we're friends and we work together all the time. We knew that it would be people's first reaction, so this is us taking ownership of that.”

More.