Judd Apatow Breaks Down His Mel Brooks Documentary

The archival research process for Mel Brooks: The 99 Year Old Man! was somewhat more involved than past documentaries its co-director, Judd Apatow, has made. It wasn’t for lack of material — in fact, Apatow, co-director Michael Bonfiglio and their team had the opposite problem.

“When someone is 99 years old, there’s a lot of footage,” Apatow told The Hollywood Reporter.

The crew of The 99 Year Old Man! sifted through all that footage to create a four-hour retrospective of Brooks’ event-filled life and career, along with present-day interviews with the comedy icon, his children, and his friends, colleagues and admirers (some of those fitting multiple categories). The HBO documentary is nominated for six Emmys, including best documentary or nonfiction special and best directing for a documentary.

The 99 Year Old Man! is one of several documentaries Apatow has made about comedians. He previously delved into the lives and work of Garry Shandling, George Carlin (with Bonfiglio) and Maria Bamford (with Neil Berkeley), and a feature doc on Norm Macdonald is slated on Netflix for the coming months. He and Bonfiglio also directed a short about the long friendship between Bob Newhart and Don Rickles.

Apatow spoke with THR about what the things he wants to get out of a documentary, broaching difficult subjects with Brooks and why he thinks Brooks has had such staying power.

When you want to do a project like this one, what is the approach to the subject? Do you go to them first? Do you start collecting things first, and then say, “Hey, we’re doing this. Can I interview you?”

HBO pitched it to me, and I started asking Mel if this was something that he might be interested in doing. He wasn’t sure for a little while because there have been a few documentaries made about Mel, and I’m sure his time is precious. Finally, I said to him, Mel, if we don’t make this documentary, we don’t have a reason to hang out a lot. And then he said, “OK, I’ll do it.”

It comes across in the in the film that you’re a fan, and Mel has been an influence on your comedy. But how much did you not know about him going into researching and filming?

I knew the things that most people knew, just from being in the culture and reading magazines your entire life and watching him on The Tonight Show. But I didn’t know much about his personal life. I didn’t really know much about his feelings about his journey. To me, he was always the funniest man in the world, and he had a lot of bravado. I never considered if he was ever insecure or had down periods in his career. How did he balance his personal life and his working life? So the deeper we got into it, the more I realized, Oh, I knew almost nothing about him. I think he’s been a private person for most of his life. The Mel Brooks you would see on talk shows, a lot of the time, it was a comic persona. There weren’t a lot of interviews from the past that that dug that deep into his inner life, and that’s what I think makes this piece really interesting.

How much of the archival research did you and Michael do yourselves versus other people involved in the production?

Obviously, it’s a big team of people, and when someone is 99 years old, there’s a lot of footage. We’re always looking for elements that people haven’t seen before. To me, these documentaries are a great opportunity to dig up some hilarious moment from The Tonight Show from the mid-’70s that, if we don’t put it in the documentary, it will never be seen again. I love exposing people to moments that might disappear into time. In addition to what was coming in, you just start going on YouTube and looking for everything. And sometimes the great interview is some obscure thing he did for European television in the ’80s, or something that we never think would be the gold mine. Then you realize, oh, what a great interview that someone else did that captured all of his feelings in a certain way.

One of the things that struck me in going through his filmmaking career is a number of his movies weren’t that well received to begin with and then sort of built their status over time. What do you think that says about his staying power?

Hard comedy is hit and miss with the critics. I think when you’re that brash and take such big chances, some critics take it in the wrong way. People are offended. People don’t realize that some of the wildest, harshest jokes are fighting against racism or power in some respect. But the audience has basically said that a few of these films that weren’t big hits have become their favorites. Spaceballs is a film that just got bigger and bigger year after year, and they just made a sequel to it that’s coming out [in April 2027].

Someone told me a long time ago, “You don’t know how well you did for 10 years.” You know when things hang around. Especially in this age where there’s so much content, when certain movies don’t go away and you keep seeing them offered up, it’s because people really like them.

You discuss some things that are difficult or not as pleasant to talk about with Mel and other interviewees. Do you discuss that with them beforehand? Do you approach it kind of the way a reporter would, and just ask?

I didn’t prepare him. I tried to be sensitive to delicate subjects. There was an enormous amount of ground to cover, and I wasn’t looking to spend a lot of time on the more difficult moments in his life. What I noticed in in the edit was there were certain subjects that we only talked about for a minute or two, but he said the perfect thing that really describes his feelings about something. When he talks about how he misses Anne Bancroft and what he misses [about her], it’s so beautiful and poetic. I never felt like I needed to push him to do 40 minutes on it. That happened time and time again — when we talked about his first marriage and what went wrong, he was very open about being very insecure early in his career, about if he was a fraud. He had a lot of insecurity, because he’s just a young kid from Brooklyn, fought in World War II before he turned 20, and then suddenly he’s writing for Sid Caesar. He accomplished so much by the time he was 25 and lived such a big life already.

What’s the draw for you in wanting to do these kinds of deep dives into people’s lives and careers?

I’m personally just interested in not just what people have done creatively, but how they live and what they learned over the course of their lives. For me, art is a way of explaining what someone went through and how they dealt with it and how they grew, and I’m endlessly interested in that. It doesn’t have to be about a comedian. I’m doing a documentary right now about Billy Strings, the bluegrass artist. It could be about anyone. It doesn’t have to be about somebody in the arts. I just generally think — and it probably comes from working with Garry Shandling — that life is hard, and the choices we make and the things we endure that are so human are endlessly fascinating.

Interview edited and condensed.