For Judd Apatow and Michael Bonfiglio, an unexpected reward of directing their two-part HBO documentary Mel Brooks: The 99 Year Old Man! was watching the legendary comedian rediscover his own jokes.
“It’s fun for us to find jokes he has not thought about since he told them 40 years ago,” says Apatow. “Some Tonight Show episode. Random interviews. He doesn’t remember talking to the BBC in 1978, and now he’s laughing at his own great humor.”
Apatow and Bonfiglio are chatting with Gold Derby several weeks after their film earned six Emmy nominations, including a nod for Best Documentary or Nonfiction Special. It may surprise you, given that Apatow is best known for directing R-rated comedies like The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up, but he and Bonfiglio, his longtime documentary partner, have actually won this category twice before — in 2018 for The Zen Diaries of Garry Shandling and in 2022 for George Carlin’s American Dream. While Shandling and Carlin had both died before their documentaries premiered, Apatow and Bonfiglio had the pleasure of sharing the final product with Brooks himself at the premiere back in January at the Academy Museum in Los Angeles.
“The whole time we were making it, we hoped Mel would be able to come to the premiere,” says Apatow. “And everyone said, ‘He’ll decide that day based on how he’s feeling.’ Then they said, ‘Yep, he’s suiting up.’ He showed up, had so much energy, did the red carpet, and just couldn’t have been happier.”
Brooks, who turned 100 on June 28 and, as the documentary shows, is still as sharp as a tack, is an EGOT winner and the writer-director of classics like The Producers, Blazing Saddles, and Spaceballs. When Apatow and Bonfiglio offered to show him a rough cut of the nearly four-hour documentary, which covers his entire life and career, Brooks passed, saying, “I don’t want to see it until after it’s way too late to make any changes.”
Apatow points out that watching a documentary about your own life for the first time in a room packed with comedy icons, family members, and longtime friends is an “emotional experience,” but that Brooks, forever the professional, had the crowd in stitches during a Q&A after the screening. “That was the most special part,” Apatow says. “He liked it. He got love bombed. He got to see his family and friends. We were thrilled.”
In the lead-up to the Emmy Awards, Apatow and Bonfiglio sat down with Gold Derby to discuss condensing a 99-year life into two TV episodes, interviewing David Lynch and Rob Reiner for the project, and the best part of nominations morning.
Read the full interview with Judd Apatow and Michael Bonfiglio below:
Gold Derby: To quote The Devil Wears Prada, “A million girls would kill for this job.” How did you get the opportunity to interview Mel Brooks and direct this documentary?
Judd Apatow: I had done an interview with him for The Atlantic the year before, where I just wanted to get wisdom from Mel. It went well and was really funny. At some point, HBO asked if we wanted to do Mel Brooks, and we said yes. We hadn’t been thinking about it, but he’s headed toward 100, and it’s the perfect time to get the stories and wisdom from his life and get him to open up emotionally in a way we hadn’t really seen him do before. He’s like Jack Benny or George Burns. He has a comic persona, and we wanted to see what was beneath it. It was funny to do interviews with Mel, trying to discourage him from being hilarious.
What was it like interviewing Mel, and how much time did you have?
Apatow: We did five days, two hours a day. You think, “10 hours to cover 100 years. You have an hour a decade.” It was a little scary because he’s reluctant to talk about certain things, and I had to gain his trust. We’ve been friends for a little while, but it still feels like you are intruding on very personal areas in someone’s mind. I’m trying to have him enjoy this conversation. I’d been on the other side of it, where people are interviewing you, and they’re brutal, and the questions are dark. We had a lot of fun, and then every once in a while, we would dip into more difficult territory. I never felt like I could grind him on painful things for long periods, so I would just ask a quick question or two and switch back.
Michael Bonfiglio: It took a lot of convincing from Judd to get him to do it. He wasn’t immediately into the idea, and had it been anybody but Judd, I don’t think it would have happened. Mel saw Judd as not only an old friend, but somebody who truly deeply understands comedy. If I had tried to do it on my own, he would have just said no.
Apatow: I said, “Mel, if we don’t do this, we have no reason to hang out. But if we do this, we get to hang out a lot.” And he goes, “OK, fine, I’ll do it.”
It must be an honor that he wants to hang out with you.
Apatow: Right? I visited him once with Bill Hader, and at the end of it, he goes, “That was fun. Let’s do it again, but not soon. Let’s do it in like four months.”
The documentary includes incredible archival footage. How did you sift through that and determine what makes the four-hour cut and what gets left behind?
Bonfiglio: It was a long process, and so much credit goes to our editor Joe Beshenkovsky, who was nominated for an Emmy. Joe’s been our partner for many years, and he’s brilliant. We had a great archival team headed by Jessica Berman Bogdan, who scoured the globe for Mel interviews — we were able to get interviews he did on Dutch television. Mel had a tendency to retell the same stories and turn them into comedy routines. With each telling, they would get funnier and a little further from the truth. One guiding principle was, “Where is he talking about something we haven’t heard before? Where is he telling a story in a different way that feels closer to reality and further from a bit?”
You’ve made several documentaries together. Do you have a system or a division of labor when you’re creating these?
Apatow: We both come at it from being very interested in the emotional lives of people. It’s not really a history lesson. It’s “What were they feeling, and what did they learn along the way?” Michael is an incredible interviewer. He is a very humane person and gets remarkable results when he talks to people. He’s also much more technically proficient than I am. I still don’t know what the lenses do. I have them explain it to me every time I make a movie, and I never get it. Michael’s very anal in the edit. He really grinds. I try to think about big-picture storytelling, because for whatever we show, there’s 10 more hours we could have done. I try to keep my eye on the larger themes.
How did you two meet and become partners?
Apatow: We were doing an episode of Iconoclasts. It was about me and Lena Dunham, and he was directing it, and I thought, “This guy is so talented.” I saw how he interviewed us and how he put it together. When someone was asking me about documentaries, I thought, “Maybe I could get him to teach me how to do it.”
I loved how you focused on Mel’s friendship with Carl Reiner. Did you always know that was going to be a focus of the doc, or did you find that in the footage?
Bonfiglio: We always talked about trying to understand Mel through the relationships in his life, and the two most important, formative relationships were with Anne Bancroft, his wife, and Carl Reiner, his best friend and comedy partner for decades. When Carl died, Mel was there. That was not something I was aware of, and Mel opened up to Judd about that. We were so moved by the way Mel was talking about that and how he didn’t want to let Carl go. We were all in tears.
Rob Reiner and David Lynch are both in the documentary. They died between the time when you interviewed them and its release. Did that impact the way you shaped the documentary at all?
Apatow: We were still editing when David passed, and we were done when Rob passed, but I don’t think either changed our thoughts. We had a great day with Rob Reiner. We have this wonderful 60- to 90-minute interview with him about his life with Mel and Carl. I hope one day we can put the raw footage out, because he was so warm and hilarious. He explained things to us that we never would have known. I asked him about the reason behind their friendship, and he said, “I think my dad was a father figure to Mel.” I never would have thought that, because Mel is so brash. He seems very controlling and has all this energy, but it makes sense. Mel said, “He’s tall, he’s kind. Who wouldn’t want Carl Reiner as their dad?” At one point, he said to me, “How nice is he? He’s as funny as me, and he lets me get the laughs.”
The documentary is nominated for six Emmys. How did you find out? Did you celebrate?
Bonfiglio: I just saw it online. I think I texted Judd, “Hey, we got nominated.”
Apatow: We were most excited for everyone else who got nominated, because on our other films, there were people that weren’t acknowledged. Joe Beshenkovsky is so remarkable. We did Garry Shandling with him, and George Carlin. He’s a full partner with us on everything we do, and he remembers everything. You’re like, “Did Mel ever talk about the Korean War?” He’s like, “Yeah, I think he said something on Serbian radio in 1980.”
Bonfiglio: Jeff Morrow is our composer; we’ve worked with him many times. I was excited to see him be recognized with his first nomination.
So many of the nominated documentaries this year focus on comedians. How does it feel to know how much people appreciate this craft?
Apatow: Comedians are interesting. They’re funny and tortured. There’s just a lot there.
Bonfiglio: And the world is so horrible and dark right now that people are desperate for joy. Mel and Martin Short and John Candy brought people so much joy, happiness, and laughter. These films are places you can get that much-needed bit of positivity.
Now that you’ve made several Emmy-nominated documentaries about comedians, are there other comedians you’d like to tackle?
Apatow: I have two more coming out in the fall. When you start these documentaries, you never know how long they’re going to take. Sometimes it’s a year, sometimes it’s three years, so it just happened to time out that they’re going to show a documentary I made with Neil Berkeley called Paralyzed by Hope: The Maria Bamford Story and Norm: The Tale of Norm Macdonald on Netflix. I don’t have any other comedy docs lined up, but we have some targets. We have some friends to harass. We’re waiting for the right moment to corner them.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
