The Mike Judge Interview: Part 2: Gene Simmons and Ben Affleck in Extract, Corporate Product Hilarity in Idiocracy, and the Kamikaze Futures of Beavis & Butt-Head

For part one of /Film's exclusive interview with writer/director Mike Judge for his new film Extract, click here.

Note: We are experiencing minor formatting issues with the Q&A in Firefox and hope to have this corrected soon.

In the second part of my interview with Mike Judge, he shares a couple of candid, behind-the-scenes tales about dealing directly with the global corporations that he skewers in his live-action films. No other work captures both this modern satire and the writer/filmmaker's view of where our world is headed better than 2006's Idiocracy. The $30 million sci-fi satire was infamously dumped into a handful theaters to die by 20th Century Fox; a surprising outcome since Judge's King of the Hill—the Emmy-winning and second longest running animated program in television history—airs on the Fox Network. In fact, King of the Hill's grand finale airs this Sunday, and continues its run in syndication and as a contextually welcome addition to [adult swim].

We also discussed how actor Ben Affleck came aboard his latest film—a midlife crisis dramedy entitled Extract—as a shaggy, drug peddlng bartender named Dean. With a cast that includes Jason Bateman in the lead, SNL's Kristen Wiig, David Koechner, Mila Kunis, and Juno's great J.K. Simmons, it will come as a surprise to anyone sans Satan and Shannon Tweed that KISS's Gene Simmons steals the picture as a sociopathic ambulance-chasing attorney. Judge included. And, of course, no interview is complete without peering in on the irreversibly clueless futures of his most famous cretin-creations and voices, Beavis and Butt-Head. Judge shares a few premises for a possible and much anticipated sequel to 1996's Beavis and Butt-Head Do America. One idea would see the two dumbasses thrown enormous -head first into our post 9/11 world gone mad.

Hunter Stephenson: Let's talk for a second about Idiocracy. When WALL·E was first released, more than a few people noted similarities between the use of Costco in Idiocracy, which in the future has become this dumb-downed metropolis, and the Wal-Mart-like corporation, Buy N Large, in WALL·E. I'm wondering if you saw those similarities?

Mike Judge: Yeah, in fact, I really liked WALL·E. And ten minutes into the movie, I thought, "Man, this is what I was trying to get Idiocracy to look like." [laughs] [laughs] That's what I hoped it would look like. I thought it was amazing. I'm a fan [of Pixar]. And someone told me recently that Pixar screened Idiocracy, someone told me that who worked there. But I don't think there was any kind of rip-off or anything. There wouldn't have been time. I almost think things like that happen when the time is right for an idea.

The zeitgeist, yeah. I consider Idiocracy, and more and more people do, to be one of the balliest studio comedies ever. I think it's amazing that you made that movie, even after what you went through at [20th Century] Fox. Initially, did you consider the repercussions of making a movie like this? Especially with using major real-life companies in such a scathing way?

Mike Judge: I realize that a lot of the things I'm doing don't fit into the category so easily that people are comfortable with. You know, when when we were writing the first draft, we'd start coming up with this stuff. And I think one of the first things that I had written, even when it was a treatment, was the billboard that said, "If you don't smoke Carlton's, Fuck You." [laughs] Because there's the billboard: "If you s

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