Family Misfortunes
Words by Dan Jude
Interview with: Seth MacFarlane
Words: Sarah May
DH: First up, is Stewie gay?
SM: Almost certainly. He’s just in the process of figuring that out.
DH: Do you think it’s weird that women have crushes on Brian the dog? You’re basically encouraging bestiality.
SM: Yes. That’s sick and disgusting. These women should be ashamed of themselves!
DH: Is there anything you’ve done that you feel slightly guilty about or a bit dirty? Ever had to pull a Quagmire storyline?
SM: No we haven’t actually, not yet. Not yet. I’m sure we will at some point but, you know, we’re not trying to offend anyone.
DH: Is there anything of you in Quagmire? Were you ever a ladies man?
SM: No I was a nerd in school, no woman would talk to me.
DH: A lot of your jokes go on a long time… they go past the point where anything else should have stopped. How do you know how far to take something?
SM: You see it on screen. You do a test and if it’s funny then you let it go. If it’s not… a lot times it’s just instinct at this stage of the game you just sort of decide, “Well, is this likely to be funny or not?”
DH: Is there one thing that you haven’t done yet that you want to do?
SM: The funny thing is when I think of that, I’ll immediately get on the phone to the writers and say, “We’ve gotta do a story about this because we haven’t done it.” That’s hard enough to find as it is.
DH: So you invented Family Guy. Did you always know what you wanted the characters to sound like?
SM: The voice depends on the character. With Lois, we had a rough idea of what we wanted – Alex Borstein came in and she was just fantastic. But it just depends. Seth Green was an interesting story. We had a sketch of Chris, and people come to audition for these shows and we show them a picture of what a character looks like. Sometimes, if we really like a voice somebody’s doing, we morph the character to their voice. So when people came in to audition for Chris, everybody saw the drawing of him and was doing a Surfer Dude voice. Seth Green came in and as he tells the story, he was with a friend of his and decided to fuck around in the audition and do an impression of Buffalo Bill from Silence of the Lambs… I mean, you can kind of hear it. Everyone else that came in did a surfer-dude type voice… but Seth was so funny he was the obvious choice.
DH: You obviously get compared to The Simpsons a lot.
SM: I’ve always been a big fan of The Simpsons. When I first saw it, I thought, “Wow my first boner”. I was in college, an animator and had aspirations of doing something myself and without that show I wouldn’t be here now. It’s so rare that something comes along that completely catches you off guard. I was instantly taken with it and still am. I don’t think any live action comedy that’s on the air can hold a candle to it.
DH: Would you ever make a full-length Family Guy movie?
SM: Yes we’ve discussed it, and have some unconventional ways to do it but I can’t reveal them yet. It would have to be something that exists on it’s own and doesn’t disrupt the flow of the series. What we have sort of in line for it is in some ways the universe of the series and in some ways not. We don’t want to do just a long episode. We want to do something that really could only be done in a movie.
DH: You’ve earned millions from Family Guy. Has it changed you?
SM: I hope not.
DH: Finally, with all this pressure on your shoulders to be funny, what are you afraid of?
SM: Skydiving. And rock climbing.
Family Guy Season 7 is out on DVD now
Posted Wed, January 14, 2009