Q: I’d like to ask you first about the transition you’ve made over the last 30 years. You started in stand up comedy, you were involved in one of the greatest sitcoms of all time and you seem to be involved increasingly in films which are based in real life.

Larry Charles: There was an epiphany that I had during Seinfeld, because how great it was, how much fun it was or how funny it was the structure, the artifice of the sitcom started to wear on me after a while. It felt so fake and false. The sets, the camerawork, even the acting sometimes just felt too contrived at a certain point and I got very tired of that actually. I felt it was preventing the audience from connecting to the material in some way. Seinfeld was great but I was interested in stripping away some of the artifice so I started seeking out things that would allow me to strip away the artifice and find some, hopefully, potentially some kind of deeper truth.

Fortunately I met Mike Moore along the way and he was a very inspiring person to meet. And then Larry (David) decided to do Curb Your Enthusiasm which was this improvisational show in which he played himself and that stripped away more of the artifice, broke down the form of sitcom even more and then eventually I wound up meeting Sacha (Baron Cohen) and that exploded all these ideas for me and really opened my eyes to a whole world that I hadn’t explored yet.

Q: Curb Your Enthusiasm has quite a distinctive documentary style, is that quite important to its success?

LC: I think at the beginning particularly it was. There’s always questions when you do “documentary style” comedy or documentaries like Christopher Guest (For Your Consideration, A Mighty Wind, Best in Show) or even more to some degree, Curb Your Enthusiasm. A big question I’m always asked is “Who’s shooting this? What’s the point of view? Is it a filmmaker, is it a documentary crew?” On Borat we had a lot of conversations about it, “Is this the Kazaki documentary crew shooting this?” Therefore it has to be kind of bad. A lot of people complained about cinematography but that was done on purpose, you know. That question became, “Where is the camera, who is the camera, what is the camera’s role here? In a Brechtian way are we saying that there’s a camera here? Are acknowledging that form? Or are we trying to pretend that the camera’s not there?” So both with Curb and with Borat that’s a continuing dialogue we’d have all the time.”

Q: Did you ever consider putting Larry David into real scenes?
LC: I absolutely have but he’s not that into it. Curb is a controlled environment. It’s a show — there’s actors and there are scenes and even if those scenes aren’t written we kind of have a structure for those scenes. With Borat we were in constant danger really, we were in constant threat. There’s a lot of anger, there’s a lot of violence, there’s a lot of police. Pretty amazing stuff, threats and guns and arrests so it’s a little bit of a different experience but it is a documentary experience but with a fictional element. A fictional element that then has to attempt to manipulate the reality to fit the fictional storyline. So you have a documentary element and a fictional element and then you try to synthesise that into some kind of narrative — that is the challenge.

Q: I believe you became an expert in disbanding your ‘kit’ and making a quick getaway during Borat?

LC: We often were doing that thing that they do on Monty Python: RUN! I felt sorry for the cameraman.

Q: Do you think it could have been as funny a movie if you just used actors?

LC: Absolutely not. We tried and we talked at various times because with a movie like that it’s very dependent on the situation. You hope that the right person can be in it. You hope that the situation works out. You hope that person will give you the piece of information that you need to move the story along. Sometimes it doesn’t work out and we would have the discussion: should we get an actor to do it, should we fake it? Our attitude was that we had to keep it authentic so that there was no compromise so that the audience could embrace the whole thing. We shot four-hour scenes, seven-hour scenes non stop and we had to stay in character the whole time.

[Larry Charles’ new movie, Religulous (WATCH TRAILER: http://www.lionsgate.com/religulous/) is a “non fiction comedy” starring American comedian Bill Maher]

I’ve always been interested in the subject of religion from various points of view. I grew up in Brooklyn, my parents were very secular Jews but they sent me to Hebrew school to get Bar Mitzvahed. I went to this big, old orthodox Hebrew school and I sort of got into it and I really started to dig it. I went home to my parents and said that I wanted to be a rabbi. They said, “Are You out of your Fucking Mind?” Most kids my age, at least in my neighbourhood, that was it and you got out. That was the end of your religious education. But those questions remained all these years.

Bill Maher is from a mixed background, his mother was Jewish his father was Catholic. He and I are about the same age and we grew up in an almost post-religious period of American where we had second and third generation Americans who had been the children of Eastern European people to a large degree who were very pious people but as they embraced and assimilated the American values that threw off a lot of the old superstitious, heavy, gothic religious stuff. We both were plagued by these larger metaphysical questions. We’d never met but we had al the same friends, I think we had even slept with the same women - we were young, we were young – we had been working on parallel tracks. He wanted to do a movie. I wanted to do a movie. There was a production company that wanted to make a movie. We met. We hit it off, we synthesised our ideas and we made Religulous. 

The premise of the movie is to make mass entertainment about such a volatile subject. That’s part of the challenge of the movie for me. That’s part of the reason I did it. I didn’t want to just make straight ahead documentary. I didn’t want to make straight ahead fictional film. I didn’t want to make straight ahead comedy. I wanted to see if I could synthesise all of these elements.

I try to accept everything as it is so I don’t go in with a preconceived notion of what I want. I don’t go in trying to impose control or impose a point of view on things. What I want as a director, and what documentary gives you the opportunity to do is to be surprised.

- Interview transcribed by Kylie Boltin