After three seasons of his show, well-known comedian louis CK still decides his acts spontaneously. He talks about running his programme on a shoestring budget using props like bells and damaged cars
You famously didn’t pitch when FX channel initially picked you out. Would you have had a pitch in mind if you had toIJ
I think that ideas that are really good for pitching are usually not good once you’re actually shooting them. like I’ve sold a movie script for a lot of money because I’ve pitched the hell out of it and then, I couldn’t write it so I had to give the money back. let me find a television show through shooting scenes and pieces and seeing what I can get. That’s the way we put it together.
After three seasons, do you know what you’re going to do now or do you still decide on the spotIJ
Well I know what I did. But I never know what I am about to do. I’m always at a terrifying precipice of genuinely having no idea what to do next. It’s a pretty awful way to live.
You just wait until the very last moment...
I would say I’ve hit strides where I know what works for the show. Every time I get to that place of confidence where I know what I’m doing, I have an instinct that tells me to totally change when that happens, because it will start getting old.
Do you have any idea of your audienceIJ
I guess a very overweight, gay man in pink underwear. No (laughs) I don’t know. Target audience is doing everything backwards. Retrofitting a show to the audience is craziness. And also they’re not going to enjoy it either. It has to come from inside and then when you make a connection with the audience through that, there’s an even more startling feeling I think, for the audience. When audience consumes something that was made for them, there’s a mild feeling of enjoyment. But when people see something that wasn’t even meant for them and they’re excited by it, it’s more exciting.
There’s definitely a layer in there that I get from stand-up which is just a tiny thing, as far as like trying to keep the show feeling worthwhile, that’s sort of an instinctual thing.
Is the show constant in terms of the kind of segmentsIJ
Well I’ve had whole episodes without stand-up and I’ve had episodes where there’s loads of stand-up. The stand-up is a really great clock for the show. If I have a story that’s only interesting for eight minutes, I can put it with a story that’s… I basically have to fill 21 minutes. Say I only have two stories that are eight minutes each, I can fill out the rest with stand-up. That’s the practical side of stand-up. But stand-up is also me talking with a lot of confidence which I don’t do anywhere else is in the show.
Do you relate to the comic guy you playIJ
I don’t act like the guy around anybody in real life. It’s definitely the guy in the story that’s closer to me in the way that I act, except for the things I do. I make really bad choices in the show that I should not be making at this stage in my life.
There are moments, for example, when you have a flashback in the second series when you go back to filming a sitcom. What is your attitude towards rest of television in its present formIJ
Well I have a lot of respect for anybody who tries to tell their stories through television. It’s a hard thing to do, and it’s also high stakes. You get knocked down a lot critically in television. It’s a hot light to work under. I’ve worked with really good people on shows that haven’t come out yet and that happens all the time. There’s a lot of stuff that I haven’t watched. I don’t have a lot of time to watch television.
Your show runs on a small budget. Is there anything you’d like to do but aren’t with the money you’ve gotIJ
Oh no, we do pretty good. The pilot of the show has a lot of bells and whistles in it that are really there because I was trying to prove that I could produce a lot with very little money. The pilot was the lowest budget of any episode. It was less than $200,000. And I have a helicopter in there, and a bus gets a flat tire, and there’s a fleet of town cars and stuff and I was really just showing that here I can do this stuff.
It’s really interesting to squeeze a lot of production out of very little money, it’s a fun game. And you get to use creativity and visual arts to make stuff that shouldn’t have happened. We did an episode in the second season where I go to Afghanistan and have this crazy adventure and that one was done for twice the usual episode fee. But it was filmed at a total of about $400,000 which wasn’t much money. And we did this episode last season, where I go to China. They gave us an extra $200,000 to produce it and we gave $150,000 back because we did not use it. We’ve learned how to work for very cheap and yet we pay our crews very well. We pay them better than some other shows.
(louie airs Monday to Saturday on FX channel)