It’s like a kind of hoodoo. As the end credits roll on The Disaster Artist (opening in Vancouver on December 8), we’re treated to a split-screen demonstration of the film’s religious attention to detail, with scenes from the infamous cult movie The Room unspooling on one side and actor-director James Franco’s spookily perfect re-creations playing on the other. After the previous 100 minutes or so of Franco’s sweet, heartfelt, but downright uncanny on-screen embodiment of Room “auteur” Tommy Wiseau—complete with the bulldog physique, droopy eye, droopier hair, and Martian accent—these final strokes almost feel like we’re witnessing filmmaking as an act of ultrafetishistic ritual magic. With an instantly familiar roar of laughter, Seth Rogen asks: “Is there any difference between the two?

“To us, things are most exciting when it really feels as if we’re doing something that all logic would dictate nobody should be doing,” the Vancouver-born star says, calling the Georgia Straight from L.A. “We always consider the audience—we talk about that a lot—but we also talk about how we want to be doing stuff that just seems totally fucking batshit crazy. It’s the exact right combination to pursue.” Who would argue the point? In the 10 years since Superbad, and alongside writing-producing partner Evan Goldberg, Rogen has pursued that combination to astronomical Hollywood success. He’s so likable (and bankable) that Rogen’s mojo even survived 2014’s The Interview, easily the most batshit of any of the team’s enterprises. (“There was maybe a moment where I was, like, ‘maybe they won’t let me work anymore,’ ” he allows, speaking of the almighty hell that Sony weathered thanks to that picture.)

But if assassinating Kim Jong-un is one thing, grappling with Tommy Wiseau is another. Based on the 2013 book, The Disaster Artist tells the story of coauthor Greg Sestero’s friendship with the unfathomably strange Mr. Wiseau and the movie that would make upside-down celebrities out of both of them. Rogen recalls getting in on the ground floor of the phenomenon that is The Room, a mind-bending collision of insane dialogue, unhinged melodrama, and performances so inept they achieve a sort of other-dimensional wholeness. All of this was self-financed by the mysteriously affluent, if cinematically maladroit writer-director-star Wiseau to the reported tune of $6 million and initially released for two legendarily sad weeks in Los Angeles in 2003.

“I loved it!” Rogen says. “I mean, I loved it in that I thought it was terrible, but I saw the movie actually pretty soon after it first came out. It was a thing, at the time, if you worked in comedy in any way. I remember when we were making Knocked Up and 40-Year-Old Virgin—we were all obsessed with this movie.”

Georgia Straight, November 2017