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Director Greg Mottola has had a Sundance-in-reverse journey since his 1996 film The Daytrippers premiered at Slamdance that year, and he then moved into the world of television directing, worked on Judd Apatow’s Freaks and Geeks followup series Undeclared, directed Superbad, one of the biggest comedies in recent years, and now is finally at Sundance with his movie Adventureland.

Adventureland was inspired by Mottola’s own experience working at a theme park in the 1980s after college, and it’s a bittersweet look at young romance. Check out our interview with Mottola after the break.

Nice to see you again. Your plans all ready? Excited for the Steven Soderbergh Mystery Night? Everyone seems to be sure it’ll be his Girlfriend Experience movie.

I’ve known Steven Soderbergh since 1987 and I saw him last night and he wouldn’t even tell me.

Really? That’s hardcore.

It’s hardcore. He’s a tough customer.

Geez. Those bald filmmakers, man…

Fucking bald filmmakers with dark glasses. Pretentious. [laughter]

So, Adventureland. Tell me when you first got hit with this concept, when you wanted to make a movie about this?

I was working on the TV show Undeclared and there were so many young people in the cast and on the writing staff, it made me very nostalgic for being young, because I was one of the older people there.

I though, you know, I’d like to write a movie about first love. Thinking back to the first relationship where it wasn’t just infatuation or horniness, it was an actual relationship and you saw the person and loved them in spite or because of their flaws.

I was a very naive young man at one point, and had lots of romantic illusions. I remember back to like the first girlfriend. I saw that person for who they were and it was a real change in how relationships were for me. I think I was just getting a little sentimental and nostalgic, hanging around with young people. But I thought it would be kind of fun to do that in a way that was naturalistic and kind of bittersweet.

And then one night we were sharing stories of “what’s the worst job you ever had,” and I started talking about working in an amusement park. A really embarrassing job. And one of the writers from Undeclared said, “You should write about that. Those are funny stories and you know that world.”

And being a lover of Fellini and anything that’s circus-y but also shabby and disgusting and awful that also kind of shifts to something beautiful and romantic too now and then, I thought, yeah, that is kind of great world to set it in. A suburban, crappy amusement park.

It just appealed to me. I guess I just like those sort of pathetic attempts at fun that those places represent. Like William Eggleston photographs or something of people’s holiday decorations. Because I always feel the sadness underneath it all.

And so I started to write the script, and then I finally got to a place where I liked it. I wrote it for a while and put it down, wrote it for a while and put it down. I got to a place I liked and I brought it to Ted Hope and Anne Carey. I knew Ted socially.

At that time my directing career was essentially inert. It was dead. And they said, “This will be hard to set up, because it’s kind of a character thing and it would probably be perceived as hard to market because it’s a period piece, but young people would be the audience.” And we were about to embark to maybe make it for $3 million or $4 million.

And then I literally got a call from Judd Apatow saying, “Do you remember that script Superbad?” I’d gone to a reading of it the year before and really liked it and had said, “I’d love to direct it if you guys would consider me.” Because Judd is super-loyal and great that way, he said, “Do you want to do Superbad?”

That happened, I put the [Adventureland] script down. And then during post on Superbad we started sending it out again. And everyone said the same thing. They said, “Hey, I heard Superbad is great, but this script, it’s set in the ’80s and we don’t know how to market it. Can you make it a contemporary movie? Can you make it more like Superbad?” Superbad finally came out and they wanted it to be Superbad 2.

There was a moment when I thought, well, maybe I shouldn’t make this film. I’ll turn into this, like, young-adult filmmaker and everyone will be disappointed that it’s not Superbad 2 and I’m not as funny as Seth Rogen. But I didn’t write the movie to try to be as funny as Seth Rogen. It’s apples and oranges to me.

I wanted, for better or worse, to make this little movie looking back 20 years ago. And I’m just grateful to have this shot.

And you didn’t give in, you didn’t change the period. You didn’t change the time.

I was stubborn. I did say that I wasn’t going to make it if they made me change it too much. Because that was part of the fun of writing it. And once I started to write and realized that I didn’t have to put in cell phones and texting and Internet, it was really liberating.

Was that also the era that you worked in the - the same time frame you worked at an amusement park yourself?

Yeah, slightly different. I worked in 1985. I was not a graduate of college yet, but I was in college, which was embarrassing to work a minimum wage job. There were other college students; it wasn’t all teenagers. But it was a mix. I was pretentious and full of myself; I thought it was beneath me.

My summer wasn’t as eventful as I made the movie, but I certainly got some perspective out of it. And then I sort of put in other things that happened late in college and whatever and brought them into the story.

What was the casting process like? Because it would have been, I think, easy to just dip back into the whole Apatow pool that you guys kind of work from a lot. I mean, you have Bill Hader back. But, you kind of went with Kristin Stewart and some other people that were outside of that influence. What was the whole thought process behind the casting?

I think probably Miramax would have been thrilled if I had cast it with even more people from Superbad or from Judd’s world. But I was very sensitive to the fact that I didn’t want it to feel like a complete repeat of what I’d just done. Pretty much everyone on the cast are the first people I thought of, that I wanted the most.

Jesse, I really had loved in Roger Dodger and The Squid and the Whale. My only hesitation was that I thought Squid and the Whale was such a perfect movie that I was intimidated to be compared to it, because the character has some similarities. But then I thought, you know what, he’s still my favorite guy for the part. And when I met him and talked about the script I just couldn’t stop imagining him doing it.

And Kristin, even though she’s a little bit younger than the character I wrote, she’s one of the - I’d known her work - and she was one of the first people I thought of because, like Jesse, there aren’t too many people in her age group who have some of the qualities I really needed. Who have the degree of complication and that weird mix of being very self-possessed and very adult in some ways, but also being very vulnerable and naked in their emotions.

And I knew she was the kind of actress who wasn’t afraid to do unlikeable things on camera, and to be a character that some people might - that might test their sympathy. I didn’t want this to be a movie that had good guys and bad guys. I wanted everybody to be flawed.

Indie films tend to be darker, or it’s a coming-of-age story, or it’s a romance that goes awry. Comedy isn’t typically as indie as we’d like it to be. What do you think about the current state of indie films, not just in regards to comedy, but American independent film right now and in regards to comedy? Do you think it’s going in any particular direction right now? Is it kind of foundering?

In one way I think indie film, a lot of people are trying to get a bead on where it’s going at all. [laughs] Because indie divisions of studios are shutting down. The recession and Wall Street, a whole bunch of sources of indie financing have gone away. They’re done. It’s scary for people who love that kind of movie making, and I’m one of them. I’m don’t know that I could have made Adventureland, even with the success of Superbad. I don’t think I could have made it this year. I think they would have said, “That’s too risky.”

So it’s hard to know. The only movie I’ve had time to see since I’ve been here is Paper Heart. I think those guys did an amazing job of changing the paradigm for themselves. They really went in and they found a way to make this beautiful, very contemporary — I think there’s a young audience that’s just going to go nuts over that movie, and rightfully so.

Michael Cera is offered everything on the planet. I know he is. And he decided to do that, and turned down a lot of big paychecks. And I think that’s fantastic. I’m going to have to think about, the next time I read a script I want to do, after a studio film how am I going to do it?

I mean, I’m writing one now that’s like a New York character comedy and it’s pretty dark and not very commercial. Or not commercial enough that I can expect anyone to give me even $10 million to do it. And I’m going to have to think about how I’m going to get that made. Maybe I’m going to have to do what Soderberg does every fourth movie and get some really good video camera, go borrow the red camera from somebody.

So do you think if you would have paused at all after Superbad before going to production on this it may not have happened the way it did?

Superbad allowed it happen, because I think before that it would have been really, really impossible. We were hoping we could really make it super-small, but the fact of the period film and the amusement park was really hard on the amount of money we had, and I can’t imagine making it for anything less than we had.

So given the state of indie film divisions and the economy, I think it would have been rough. But it’s also cyclical. I’m not so pessimistic. The desire for those kind of movies is not going to go away. It’s how we see them and how they get made is going to change a lot.