Seth Rogen on creativity, work and weed use

“He talked about making that movie after he’d made some big studio films,” Rogen recalled. “And he said: ‘With this one, we wanted to make the movie we would have made before we even went to film school, as though we knew nothing. Any idea we had, we would do it, even if it seemed crazy or stupid or pretentious or whatever. We wouldn’t think about, Oh, it’s been done, or people will hate that, or that’s too weird.’

With ceramics, Rogen found a practice that spoke to both the left and right sides of his brain. He flipped open a notebook in which he’d written the chemical breakdowns of various glaze recipes. “This reminds me of the camera side of filmmaking, which is very scientific and technical, and which I actually understand really well,” he said. “It’s funny, whenever it’s revealed to someone that I know about cameras, they’re surprised, and it’s, like, I make movies!”

Mark Rogen, Seth’s father, told me that his son suffered from an undiagnosed attention-deficit disorder as a kid, until “the miracle of marijuana changed his life — we had him on a strict diet that helped keep him in balance, but it wasn’t 100 percent. Marijuana finally made his cells relax.” Rogen compares his own weed habit to wearing shoes: He could probably make it through a day without it, but “it’s just not how I would prefer to be feeling.”