I think Stanley Tucci was having an affair with his mother. He had this odd quality that I haven't seen him ever get to do again in a movie that just made me think he's got some chops. He's got a strangeness to him, but he's also clearly been stuck in this role because of his looks and his type. He's been really pigeonholed, I felt.
Greg MottolaI'm really glad to have made a movie that way on Superbad, because I learned a lot about what can be done and what the limitations are.
Greg MottolaI don't really talk about this because it seems indulgent, but I lost my hair, I'm bald, I had alopecia in my teens. That was back in the late '80s, well before people shaved their heads. So it's probably one of the reasons why I have been obsessed with that age, because it's locked in time where I feel like I had this personal loss that so affected my vanity, and I don't really feel like I handled it well. I'm so much older now, so it's not a big deal, but when I think back at it, I can conjure up how I felt then.
Greg MottolaJon Hamm was the first I thought of for the other role in [Keeping Up with the Joneses], I recently worked with him on Clear History, an HBO improv movie that we had done together.
Greg MottolaI talked about the summer of 1985, when I worked at an amusement park on Long Island, the kind of place where someone would pull a knife on you if they wanted a better prize than you were giving them. You found a lot of used needles beside the cotton-candy cart at the end of the night. It was a pretty white-trash, scary place. It was one in a series of terrible jobs I've had, coming from not much money and having no particularly resourceful skills. And at one point one of my friends, a writer on the show, Jenny Konner, said, "You should write about that."
Greg Mottola