ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: The other thing that sets the Apatow-brand comedies apart is the combination of the hard-R kind of raunchiness with the emotional sweetness.
JUDD APATOW: D--- and heart. That's what I'm going to call my new production company: D--- Heart Productions.
MICHAEL CERA: Those are the two key organs involved in life.
APATOW: There are obviously great comedies that aren't R-rated, but you can certainly do a very honest, frank, sweet, and also disgusting type of comedy with an R rating. I always enjoyed writing for The Larry Sanders Show because it was fun to hear Rip Torn say f---. To me, it's just about showing how people really express themselves. I mean, this conversation is R.
CERA: It was never a conscious effort to swear on Superbad. If anything, when we were doing the clean version for TV, it was a conscious effort not to swear.
APATOW: It was so hard to get Jonah to stop saying f---. We spent so much time trying to thin out the f---s. It was like, ''What f--- is not connected to a joke?''
JONAH HILL: One time Judd sent me an e-mail during shooting: ''You should try not to curse so much, because you need to make it emphasize more when you do curse.'' I just wrote back: ''F--- that.''
APATOW: You've got the f--- crutch.
SETH ROGEN: But if you're going to make a realistic movie, if the characters are over 15, it has to be R-rated.
HILL: Michael and I talked about how it never seems gratuitous.
ROGEN: To your mother it might.
HILL: It just seems like how people talk. If I got hit by a car, I'd be like, ''F---!'' It just seemed to me like it just sounded realistic.
APATOW: We got to a good f--- level.
ROGEN: We found our stride, f----wise.
HILL: Then I switched on the vag.
APATOW: I thought that when we showed Superbad to audiences, we would start an ongoing debate about how dirty should the movie be. And at the very first screening, nobody in the audience had any issue with anything in the movie in the numbers that would make you change it. I couldn't believe it. I thought we would be debating so many set pieces and language and cutting things. And there was nothing.
ROGEN: We didn't get to do anything to offend a large part of the audience. And we almost tried. It's pretty shocking.
CERA: So what's the biggest thing you guys have had to cut from your movies?
APATOW: On Knocked Up, we had to cut some jokes that made everyone dislike the friends. There was a run where they were talking about nude scenes and somebody was saying that they were going to view all of Julianne Moore's movies to catalog her nude scenes and that it was going to take them a couple of days.
HILL: I said her bush was like the hedge maze in The Shining.
ROGEN: And I went, ''Red bush! Red bush!''
APATOW: And the whole audience got very upset.
ROGEN: And to me that was like a miraculous moment of genius!
HILL: I remember it ended and Seth and I high-fived. We were so proud of ourselves.
APATOW: It'll go back in on the DVD. There was a sequence we had to trim down in 40 Year-Old Virgin which was Steve Carell watching a porno and fast-forwarding past the sex to get to the parts where they talk. You didn't really see anything. You just saw people moving very quickly and maybe boobs shaking really fast, but no penetration or anything. But the test audiences were really freaked out. I thought people would really laugh at super-sped-up sex.
CERA: They do that in Clockwork Orange where they have that sequence where everybody's having sex really fast.
APATOW: I didn't have that Kubrickian touch.
ROGEN: We didn't have Beethoven's Fifth.

Is there always a struggle to find the appropriate line on things like that?
APATOW: The audience tells you very quickly where the line is.
ROGEN: But, like, the period-blood scene [in Superbad], we didn't have any options. We did paint ourselves into a corner, just hoping people would go with it. And people went with it for the most part, thank God, or we'd be reshooting right now.
HILL: I remember that night, too, because Michael and I weren't allowed to go to the first test screening in case something went horribly wrong.
APATOW: Just in case they hated you and you'd never get off the couch. Here's how that call goes: ''Jonah wants to go to the first screening.'' ''No! Because if they hate him, he'll never recover!''
HILL: But I remember the second everyone called me and e-mailed me at the same time. Judd sent me a few e-mails, one being like, ''It's crazy, it's awesome, everyone loved it.'' And a second later he sent another one: ''Even period-blood killed,'' with five exclamation points.
ROGEN: I think that's the most nervous I've ever been in my life, at that first screening when the period-blood scene started. We would have had to reshoot something. I was horrified, absolutely horrified.
APATOW: It's so gross we can't even talk about it in EW. This whole section won't be in there.

EW Video: See Michael Cera and Jonah Hill bring the funny to EW's revealing cover shoot. Plus, watch an exclusive video clip from Superbad below

COMING UP IN PART TWO: The filthy foursome discuss critics, the agonies of failure, and the joys of awkwardness. ''I'm always so awkward and always reading into situations and thinking about how other people are interpreting something that they're probably not even thinking about. Then I just see Evan in his underwear in the middle of the street, like, 'So what are we doing, dudes?'''

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