Was the ending you used always the ending you had planned?
Seth Rogen: That ending actually is something that was always in the script but something that we didn’t film initially with principal photography. It’s always our instinct to short change the ending a little bit. With Superbad, Judd was the one who argued for us to show them the next day in the mall. He said we should probably add more. So, we didn’t learn our lesson there, and then we filmed this movie in the same way. Overwhelmingly, when we showed This Is The End to people, there was a massive flood of like, “well, what happens next?”
Evan Goldberg: The studio was like “great, so when do you reshoot and make an ending? When are you going to shoot the thing everyone wants to see?”
Seth Rogen: We filmed [the finale] for this film afterwards because we stupidly thought less is more. Then we realized, no, more is more.
Evan Goldberg: We might not have had enough money.
Seth Rogen: No, we did have enough money.
Evan Goldberg: Did we? Yeah, we were just stupid.
With references to Rosemary’s Babyand The Exorcist there’s a real sense of the stuff that we grew up with rather than the new horror, which is trying to be supernatural and go in a different way. Did you always want to go in that specific way?
Seth Rogen: In preparing the movie, we honestly just watched every horror/apocalyptic/demonic movie that there was, basically.
Evan Goldberg: We watched The Thing a lot, and we had a moment to us that was like that film, where the matches were being passed around. The Exorcism and the demon rape thing, you know what it is instantly and you totally recognize what movie it is. I think even young kids have seen those movies.
Seth Rogen: We watched War of the Worlds to get ideas for us running from the 7-Eleven back to the house. We kind of referenced a lot of ridiculous stuff. Sam Raimi was a big influence on us, the way he has his kind of over the top gruesome horror but it’s funny still. We kind of just mentally noted what movies we really loved that scared the shit out of us and tried to do the same.
How did you develop the look of the monsters?
Evan Goldberg: When it came to the monsters, we, in our amateur director move did what everyone else does, declaring we were gonna use real shit. “We’re not gonna use computers!” We constructed suits and the whole time the VFX guys kept looking at us. [laughs] We were asking them, “you don’t think this is gonna make it into the movie?” and they said, “you just do what you want, it’s fine, we budgeted for this so don’t worry.”
Seth Rogen: And then you watch it and you’re like “yeah, it’s a dude in a suit, chasing us.”
Evan Goldberg: Society’s gone so far towards CG that like in my head, we could do some Guillermo del Toro shit but like only he can do that. Even he’s making giant CG monsters now though. So it’s over. CG it is.
Was there a vision of hell itself? We got to see this awesome vision of heaven but we don’t get to see hell itself.
Seth Rogen: No one could possibly do it better than Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey, so…
Evan Goldberg: We did briefly write a hell sequence where Franco and Jonah were smoking weed with Hitler. But we just thought, too soon. That’s what we concluded, ultimately. If we make a sequel, we’ll probably start in hell.
Seth Rogen: Yeah, exactly. But yeah, Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey…It was a good hell. What can I say? We’re no Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey.
That concludes our interview but we’d like to thank Seth and Evan for talking with us. Be sure to check out This Is The End when it hits theatres on Wednesday.
