Tom, Tomorrow

MTV’s madman sees his future on the big screen.

Tom Green is tired. It seems ironic for someone who's made it a recurring gag to wake people up in the middle of the night and interview them, but the long day of interviews seems to have worn him out. He's soft-spoken, even mellow, although he does maintain his fascination with repeating words until they no longer sound like English: Upon receiving a bag of promotional items from the Fox PR folks, he loudly recites the phrase "Loot bag" at least four times in a row, and this after he has been corrected for repeatedly calling it a "Luke bag." As we sit down to talk, he delights in naming every single kind of fruit that has been candied and chocolate-coated in the confectionery bowl on the table.

It turns out Tom isn't always a lunatic -- he just plays one on TV. Or rather, he becomes one. In person he's almost shy, hard as that may be to believe. But put him in front of the cameras, and he'll do just about anything, most notoriously documenting his battle with testicular cancer in gruesome detail while making jokes about his own possible death. "It was sort of therapeutic for me to do it," he says, "being in the middle of a very scary situation, and I had to confront it on camera. It makes it a little easier to have fun with it."

Green hasn't done his TV show since that episode, and is planning on making the transition to feature films, starting with his directorial debut Freddy Got Fingered. It's the kind of movie only he could get away with, featuring horse masturbation, blood-gushing umbilical cords and repeated violence against a young child. Ironically, it was the much-maligned test-screening process that kept his vision intact. "There was negotiations, and they tried to take things out of the movie occasionally, which did not get taken out of the movie, which is exciting to me, and I think after we started playing the movie to audiences and stuff, people were laughing, you know, at the horse scene, or the baby scene, or whatever scene you might have thought would have been problematic. You know, people started to, I think, see the fun in it, including the studios."

Meanwhile, MTV has tried to fill the zaniness gap left by Green with its controversial show Jackass, in which ordinary people do deliberately stupid and dangerous things on camera. Does he feel supplanted in any way? "No, I feel that's a different kind of show. I like that show, I think it's more of a skateboard-culture type thing. I was a skateboarder and I have that in my blood and that sort of edge possibly, [but] I came from a stand-up comedy background and doing a comedy TV show...I don't really feel the shows are that comparable, other than the fact that they were both on MTV, and they both shoot on guerrilla-style camera." That, and no one's talking about suing Green because their kid set himself afire after watching his show. "I think it's a little bit less imitatable, our show, I think there might be a feeling with that Jackass show that anybody can do it...We write what we do, as more of a performance-oriented thing. I don't think anyone would wanna copy what I did, because it just doesn't seem like it would be very fun to copy."