It’s fitting that creative partners Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg chose to premiere their Apple TV+ series “The Studio” — a scathingly accurate satire of the modern film industry — at South by Southwest, a festival at once adoring of film culture and deeply irreverent about Hollywood.
“I think a lot of people wonder why so many bad films are made in Hollywood,” Rogen said in the Q&A following the two-episode premiere, which played to waves of roaring laughter from the audience at the Paramount Theater in Austin. “But what people should wonder is how any good films are made in Hollywood. So that’s what we’re trying to show here.”
Rogen plays Matt Remick, who is suddenly promoted into the job running the fictional Continental Studios (think Sony Pictures mixed with Warner Bros. and a dash of Paramount). While veteran actors and fellow SXSW attendees Catherine O’Hara, Kathryn Hahn, Ike Barinholtz and Chase Sui Wonders play members of Matt’s team, the show also boasts a cavalcade of top stars playing (versions of) themselves. The first episode alone features Paul Dano, Peter Berg, Nicholas Stoller, Martin Scorsese, Charlize Theron and Steve Buscemi, most of whom are wrapped up in Matt’s frantic quest to lock down a director for his first major project: a feature film adaptation of Kool-Aid.
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At one point, Rogen said that he and Goldberg — who direct the show, and wrote the first episode with fellow executive producers Peter Huyck, Alex Gregory and Frida Perez — told Scorsese that he should complain that he should’ve sold a project “to fuckin’ Apple.”
“And he’s like, ‘You guys say “fuck” too much,’” Rogen recalled. “And we were like, ‘We say “fuck” too much?!’” (Scorsese’s 2013 film “The Wolf of Wall Street” once held the world record for the most usage of the f-word.)
Rogen said that he and Goldberg sought out to populate their film with as many top-tier names that they could because “we wanted to paint an accurate picture of a Hollywood movie studio, and so we wanted to use people that you believe a studio would get excited about.”
He then cited the 2015 film version of the HBO series “Entourage,” which was similarly meant to take place in the heart of a Hollywood milieu. “They’re having a big party and, like, Bob Saget’s the most famous guy there,” Rogen said. “I love the guy, but it was always like, I don’t know if that’s how it would be.”
They gathered their cast, Goldberg said, by reaching out to people “who we’re friends with already — and then some people who showed up that we’re not friends with, and I still don’t know why.”
“I’d never met Martin Scorsese before,” Rogen said. “We couldn’t believe he did it! But we worked hard to write roles we hoped were funny and that we hoped that people would respond to. All anyone wants is a good joke, that’s what we really learned. It’s very enticing to people to feel like they get to be funny. Even Charlize, we were like, ‘It’s one line. But it’ll kill, we promise!’”
One of the most striking aspects of the show is its cinematography. Every scene in the series unfolds in a single shot — Episode 2, “The Oner,” is even about director Sarah Polley trying to shoot a pivotal scene in one take.
“It was a great way to mitigate studio notes because we couldn’t change anything once we’d shot it,” Rogen said. “We wanted it to feel really immersive and we wanted it to be really stressful and panic-inducing, which is our experience in the industry.”
“If we’re panicking because there’s no cutting, you’ll panic when you’re watching it,” Goldberg joked.
“The Studio” premieres on Apple TV+ on March 26.
