The new film Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping is a musical mockumentary from producer Judd Apatow and the Bay Area comedy group The Lonely Island. The trio of members (Andy Samberg, Jorma Taccone and Akiva Schaffer) have known each other since childhood and after working together on Saturday Night Live, their comedy shorts exploded all over the pop culture lexicon.

Their first feature film together was 2007’s Hot Rod and in-between then and this current project, The Lonely Island have been releasing comedy albums and refining their musical skills. Popstar is a direct result of all that experience and it focuses on jaded and insecure Conner4Real (Andy Samberg), a pop star diva whose best weapon is self-destruction. The laughs in Popstar are sometimes buried in the strangest places and aside from a ton of celebrity cameos, the film also showcases a strong visual style by co-directors Taccone and Schaffer.

The Lonely Island trio recently returned to their Bay Area roots to promote Popstar and the following is a transcription of our conversation with them.

Q: You guys took seven-and-a-half months to edit this film. When you’re working with so much material, what kinds of things come and go through the editing process?

Akiva Schaffer: Any time we would do a talking head interview, for example if we sat down with Usher, we would talk for 30 minutes to an hour and go over everything that happens in the movie.

Andy Samberg: There’s also full musical performances that we didn’t use that will end up on the DVD extras and those songs are also on the soundtrack.

Jorma Taccone: We also had to cut out performances from people that we love, like Dave Franco, Ryan Phillippe, Ed Sheeran. Akon’s not really in the movie. We had to make some hard decisions.

Samberg: From the beginning we were looking at movies in this genre and they all seem to keep it really tight. The Christopher Guest ones, Sacha Baron Cohen ones and even Jackass, so we were hell bent on keeping it tight and under 90 minutes and the cost of that was cutting some babies we loved.

Q: I’m sure test screenings were a big part of that.

Taccone: Yeah, they were really helpful. You could look at that cynically and corporate but it’s really about watching the movie with an audience and learning what works and what doesn’t. You want it to be as entertaining as possible while telling a good story.

Q: There are so many celebrity cameos in this movie. Is there one person who surprised you on set with how funny they were?

Taccone: I’d say Mariah Carey for how much she got the joke and how funny she was on camera.

Schaffer: Nas was another one because of how respected he is.

Samberg: Seal, he killed it.

Taccone: Sometimes we write something and anybody can perform it, but sometimes it has to be Seal or Michael Bolton.

Q: How easy or difficult was it to get all these celebrity cameos for the movie?

Samberg: Some of them were easy because we’ve worked with them before. Some of them were trickier and we went through reps with a lot of them and inevitably we would get on the phone with them. With someone like Ringo Starr, Judd Apatow just said he was coming on set, so we were like, thanks Judd! Generally people don’t show up unless they’re into it, so we have the luxury of them saying, “Hey, I have a sense of humor and want to fuck with my image.” That was definitely part of the reason the shoot was exciting.

Schaffer: Also, we don’t hate popstars, so we wouldn’t have taken any joy out of destroying them at the end. The movie isn’t about bashing pop culture and popstars. We’re trying to be keep it balanced.

Q: Is there one question you keep getting from journalists that you wish would go away?

Samberg: None of them have been that annoying. The one thing I’ll say and the thing we didn’t anticipate was how much people were going to latch on to the Bieber of it all. When we went into this, we weren’t saying let’s make a movie about Justin Bieber. We said let’s make a movie about pop music and pop culture. I think because of the trailer and the title on the surface it seems more about him than we intended or wanted, so we’ve been doing a lot of reassuring people that we like Justin Bieber.

Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping is now playing nationwide.

Top photo by Sean McCarthy.