MONDO EXTRAS

JA: In the beginning, we always had a few scenes that we knew weren't written as well as they could be. On the set, we'd just let them keep going with them. If Loudon Wainwright [who plays Hal] has to complain about women, then we know we're going to give him an opportunity to ramble for five minutes and we'll just steal lines from it. But as the show progressed, it was taking so much time to do it that we started only doing it in very specific moments. ["For those who prefer to be spoiler-free, the gist of what he says next is that he let a guest star (in what will be the third-to-last episode) improvise his lines much the way he did with Loudon." -- Heathen] Ben Stiller did a show the other day playing Eric's ex-stepdad who thinks Eric is high all the time. We knew we'd just put two cameras on them and let Ben try to tell [Eric] why he shouldn't smoke so much pot, even though [Eric] doesn't smoke pot. It kind of works that way. We know what the scene is, and there's usually a moment where ten things would be right, so we let the actors make up a bunch of them. Seth had to watch Girls Gone Wild on the show, so we put a camera on him and put Girls Gone Wild on TV and he'd just say what Seth would say at home. And we knew it would be good enough for the show.

H: Is that how the Maxim speech came to be?

JA: No, that was actually one we had written out.

H: Are there any particular moments where you recall the actors improving a scene by improvising it? I skimmed the scripts that are available online and noticed that in "Hell Week," the stuff about Ron thinking Heath's catalog photo was Meg Ryan isn't in the final draft.

JA: That was improvised. Almost the entire scene with Matt [Taint] yelling at Samm Levine about being obsessed with pickles was improvised. We kind of wrote a short version of that on the spot, and told Matt to get really mad at him, and he came out with such witty gems as, "We're a frat. We drink beer." What else is improvised?

Nick Stoller: Everything Jason Segel....