Q+A: 'Superbad' Director Greg Mottola Talks About His Mix-Tape Days

Please forget what you've heard. Adventureland is not Superbad 2. It's melancholy. It's wistful. There's no McLovin. There are no menstrual cycles gone awry. There are no snickering references to what "they said would happen" in health class. If that bothers you, please leave now.

They gone? Good. Because what Adventureland definitively, delicately, deliciously does is supplant the yearning in Superbad—that comical yearning, for bedpost notches and an authentic-looking fake ID—with, well, more yearning. Adultish yearning. Yearning for reciprocated love, not lust. Yearning for a feeling of comfort in one's own skin, not stolen beer. Yearning for some distant, imagined years when adolescent nerdiness melts into cocktail-party smarts—for the days when girls will finally, for the love of God, stop calling you "sweet."

Director and writer Greg Mottola, the man behind Adventureland—its story and much-ballyhooed soundtrack are lifted from his own life—talked to NEWSWEEK about his days working a crappy job in the 'burbs, and yearning for more. Excerpts:

NEWSWEEK: So this is your story—exactly how autobiographical is it?
Greg Mottola: Enough that it makes me extraordinarily embarrassed to have made. I was watching at the premiere, thinking, "... Yeah, thank God I'm married." I'm not so sure I'd get dates after this movie comes out. I'm the most awkward man alive. I also didn't get to meet someone as interesting and cool as Kristen Stewart in the summer I worked in an amusement park. She's based on a composite of a few early girlfriends.

And you really worked at an Adventureland-style park?
I certainly did work at an amusement park. In 1985. Wow—I'm in denial about the year. I was in college, and I had no skills.

How real are the characters?
Everyone else in the movie is either a composite or based directly on a person I know, from either high school or beyond. [The character played by] Martin Starr is a lumped-together version of every guy I ever met who was very smart—often smarter than myself—and who would turn me on to good books and music and movies and, for some reason or another, would have some kind of fatal fear that held them back. A terror of putting themselves out there. And I'd be confused as to why, because these were the people who actually gave me something meaningful along the way.

Is weed the passport to all good places in life?
I'm a terrible pot-smoker. I guess my parents will read this. Eh, I don't think it'll shock them too much. I have to hide under a bed if I smoke, I don't want to interact or see anyone. But it had the cachet to unlock certain social groups.

I'm kind of sick of reading—as I'm sure you are—that this "isn't 'Superbad 2.'" Were you actively trying to avoid the gross-out genre?
[This movie] was very conscious; I really didn't want it to be "Superbad 2," as much as Miramax would have liked it to be. I actually wrote it before "Superbad" and was about to try and get it set up, when Judd [Apatow] called me and said, "Hey, wanna do 'Superbad'?" ["Adventureland"] goes through similar territory, but it's approaching it from the opposite direction. I very consciously didn't intend it to be an out-and-out comedy. And I suppose that goes to my feeling that there's a no-man's land between indie and mainstream films' treatment of young adult life. In indies, life is very dark and realistic, and in mainstream films, the edges are all rounded off and very sentimentalized. ["Adventureland"] is definitely something in the middle of that. I looked at "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" and "American Graffiti"—that slice of life that includes both the ridiculous and the awful. I certainly have memories of "Fast Times," not being shocked, but being kind of consoled that, "Here's a movie that deals with something real and sad." It was so close to what that time of life was like for me, the mundane jobs at the mall. Coming from a pretty modest community, where my family didn't have much money, I remember that [movie] feeling very real.

Everybody's talking about the music in the film. How did you settle on "Rock Me Amadeus" as emblematic of the overplayed '80s hit?
I had to pick a song that I remember being tortured by, but that I had some actual affection for, and that hadn't completely crossed over into a status that I would call "musical wallpaper," something that's so overplayed that we don't even hear it anymore. "Rock Me Amadeus" functioned the right way. I approached the Falco estate, and they were very kind and had a great sense of humor.

"I approached the Falco estate" is kind of a funny sentence.
I think, actually, that Falco had a great deal of talent. But it also just … when you hear "Rock Me Amadeus" for the fifth time in one day, it makes you want to blow your brains out.

Talk about nabbing Yo La Tengo to do the score.
I've always been a fan. Their first record goes all the way back to '86, when I made "The Daytrippers," and I sent them a fan letter. I said I'd made a movie and if they needed anyone to direct a video, I was there. Something really pathetic. And they invited me to a show and have been really friendly ever since. I didn't know if they'd be into something like this, but luckily they really were. We wanted rock-band instrumentation, but much more subtle and a bit ambient. They're of the same philosophy that I am: that the score shouldn't necessarily do the exact same thing that the scene is doing. They like to be oblique.

So is the soundtrack basically your iPod Top 50 Most Played?
Well, my mix tapes did tend to be on the depressing end. And now suddenly I'm the '80s guy. F--king scary. "Short Circuit III" might come my way. But I didn't want it to be like, "Ugh. The director is forcing us to listen to his favorite records." I wanted to make it a character thing—that through music, Jesse [Eisenberg's] and Kristen Stewart's characters connected the dots and got through their adolescent angst. And it is me. Some of the Replacements songs are there because that's a band that helped me through some loneliness. I would listen to that kind of music when I was writing the script, and we could play it while we were filming scenes so that Kristen and Jesse could get into the mood.

Did you have a Ryan Reynolds growing up—an older, burned-out guy who would school you in love?
There was a rocker dude who was friends with one of my neighbors. He looked a bit older than me. Sort of like an Irish Robert Plant, if you can picture that. He was simultaneously ridiculous and we also thought he was super-cool. He somehow could live in both of those spaces at the same time. I definitely asked his advice about women a few times, because he had an attractive girlfriend and I wanted to know his magic. And he gave me a few guitar lessons.

Grappling with religion and the barriers it creates is a supporting theme of the movie. Why?
Having grown up in a Catholic family, while I felt like I was never conscious of any blatant anti-Semitism, I was aware of a slightly insidious, us-versus-them mentality. A lot of my best friends and early girlfriends were Jewish, and I encountered what was more of a suburban small-mindedness, of people needing to defend their tribe. And I guess I am fascinated with religious people.

You coax these totally natural, restrained performances out of your cast ... How'd you get your actors to be so loose?
To me, it helps when you have actors who just have a really good BS detector. Like Kristen, who just really can't move forward in a scene if she feels like she's phoning it in. Once she's there, and gets where she's coming from, it's amazing. I met Ron Howard while doing "Arrested Development," and I asked about "American Graffiti," because I love that film. He said that George Lucas would tell the camera operators that, if something technical goes wrong, if the actors walk into bad light or anything happens, just keep shooting, that he really wanted the actors to feel like [the scene] was happening in real time and that there was nothing technically that could stop it. I did a lot that way. It was slightly different than working with Judd, where a lot of it was improv. Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig excepted.

My favorite lines are the complimentary put-downs, like, "You're so strong-ish" or "I'm so surprised I'm making out with you." I take it a few of those have come your way.
I would usually get, "You're so sweet." Which in guy world is code for "You're not going to get around me."

Well, I think the movie is really sweet.
[Sighs]