I was in college - Carnegie Mellon, which is one of the reasons Pittsburgh was appealing to me - and I personally feel that whole world of what we used to call "college radio" is a big part of what kept me sane through a period where I stopped dating, I felt like a freak, I felt like no girl would like me. You know, a very adolescent response to losing my hair. I turned to obsessing about The Replacements and The Smiths and R.E.M. and getting further into The Velvet Underground. People who, in my sheltered suburban life, I knew of, but didn't know fully.
Greg MottolaI'm a huge fan of Zach's [Galifianakis] and I auditioned Zach a million years ago on a movie called Duplex which I was fired from. But Zach came in - It was like 2000, maybe - as a buddy stand-up that people were starting to notice and there was something about him I loved. He wasn't quite right for the part in [Keeping Up with the Joneses] and I got fired anyway, so who cares? But I always wanted to work with Zach.
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 MottolaI lived on Thompson Street in SoHo for 13 years and I watched it go from a little Italian neighborhood to the Mall Of America. Then the obvious fact that it's pre-Internet, pre-cell phone. Everyone I think thinks their youth is a more innocent time. I just don't know.
Greg Mottola