- 54 minutes ago
Seth Rogen joins GQ to reveal his 10 Essentials. The Canadian actor and comedian breaks down his daily essentials: from his camera (“there’s probably no greater cliché in all of the world”) to his cologne (“I’d like to thank my nose for helping me make this smell”). Watch the full episode of GQ’s 10 Essentials, as Seth Rogen reveals 10 things he can’t live without.Credits:Director: Kristen DeVoreDirector of Photography: AJ YoungEditor: Louville MooreTalent: Seth RogenProducer: Sam DennisLine Producer: Jen SantosProduction Manager: James PipitoneProduction Coordinator: Elizabeth HymesTalent Booker: Dana MathewsCamera Operator: Oliver Lukacs; Shay Eberle-GunstGaffer: Lucas VilicichDIT: Lauren WoronaSound Mixer: Justin FoxProduction Assistant: Fernando Barajas; Hollie OrtizPost Production Supervisor: Jess DunnSupervising Editor: Rob LombardiAssistant Editor: Justin SymondsSpecial Thanks: Chateau Marmont
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LifestyleTranscript
00:00Hello, GQ. I'm Seth Rogen, and these are my essentials. I could live without these things.
00:05But I'm not going to ask them to rename the whole video just for me.
00:19There's probably no greater cliché in all of the world than an actor thinking they're a
00:28photographer. You're around good lighting. You're around cinematic things all day. You work with
00:34cameras. You get it in your head to get some cameras and to try to learn about cameras. And
00:39as you should. I got really into panoramic cameras. Probably the two greatest panoramic cameras of all
00:45time. These are two different kinds of panoramic cameras. The WideLux is cool. Jeff Bridges is
00:50like famous for using this. What's cool is it's a purely mechanical camera. It doesn't take any
00:57batteries or anything like that. So you need a light meter, which is separate, to use it. And
01:02you set the stops, the frame rate, using these. You can do it at a lower frame rate. See, this
01:07really illustrates. That's a 15th of a second. It's hard to load the film, and you'll see there's a
01:12little tiny slit that lets the light in. It goes across as the lens happens, and it exposes. It's
01:19taken a lot of pictures with this. I really like. I once brought it to Saturday Night Live and took
01:22some really cool pictures backstage. I found one with me and Steve Martin and Dave Franco
01:28and Jonah. I just sent it to them, actually, because I hadn't seen it in a long time. This
01:31is similar, but different. The Hasselblad X-Pan is another panoramic camera that's very elusive
01:38and very hard to find. Much harder to find than the WideLux, actually. Fuji manufactured the camera,
01:43and then some of them were rebranded as Hasselblads. This is one of the Fuji ones that was not
01:49rebranded. Let me focus. Boom.
01:58And I'm not naturally someone with a lot of energy, so I have to, and I do a lot, so I gotta
02:02get myself there, chemically. Is caffeine a chemical? I don't know. I get there chemically,
02:07with caffeine. And I do pottery, and I made this espresso. This is an espresso cup I made myself,
02:12for myself, which is sad to make a thing for yourself. But what defines essential more than
02:17something you made for yourself? It says my name on there. It says Seth. It's my maker's mark,
02:23and I had one made on Etsy. How do you make your espresso reflection?
02:27I've experimented with having my own thing. I played a barista in a movie once, and so I learned
02:33how to do that. And honestly, I don't have as much time as I would like.
02:37What's funny, but then you go to Italy, they drink Nespresso in Italy. You would think Italians
02:42have more, I don't know, love of the game than that. But you go to Italy, they're dropping
02:49Nespresso's on your table at the fanciest restaurants. I'm like, they like this shit.
02:54It's like when you go to Jamaica, they really like Bob Marley.
02:58So, one of my essentials, again, I don't know if it's essential. It's a bag I like. I carry a bag
03:05around everywhere. My dad carries a purse now. And you're like, nice man bag. He's like, it's a purse.
03:10It's a woman's purse. Me and my wife, we've always made fun of my dad for wearing a purse.
03:15We just think it's silly. And then one day, a few years ago, I was like, I just wish I had a bag
03:19to carry my stuff around. And my wife was like, you mean a purse? And I was like, oh my god,
03:25I do want a purse. So anyway, I bought this bag.
03:30Do you call it a purse? I call it a bag. I call it a bag. But if someone's like, nice purse,
03:34I can't correct them because I believe it is technically a purse.
03:40I've had colognes over the years. But then a few years ago, me and my wife Lauren and some friends
03:45went to Grosse, France, which is where it's like the perfume hub and cologne hub of France.
03:55And we went to a very old, I guess, perfumery, perfumery, as the French say, perfumery,
04:03called Molinard. Molinard. What you get to do there is you get to make your own like cologne
04:09or perfume. And you work with someone who's called a nose. A sommelier for perfume is a nose. And to
04:16become a nose, it's no fucking joke. You gotta like blind identify like 200 smells or something like
04:23that, which seems crazy. But a nose, nose. This is my smell. And it smells good. And they keep your smell
04:30on file. So if you want to reorder your smell, which I have, they will remake your smell and then
04:37send it to you. So I'd like to thank my nose for helping me make this smell. And I think it smells
04:44good. I don't get any compliments. No one's ever complimented me on it. But I personally think it smells good.
04:50I lose a ton of lighters. And I find that if I have a lighter that's like in any way distinguished
04:57from a normal Bic lighter, I'm much less likely to lose it. This is a lighter. It's called the Douglas
05:03Field Lighter. It's like a very old American company. It's from the 30s, I think. It's very easy.
05:09Simple lighter. Screws shut on the bottom. You put it in fluid and it doesn't leak out. Zippos kind of
05:13don't actually seal. And so the fluid evaporates very quickly. These ones actually seal. And so the fluid
05:19stays in them much better. And like the flick and close is very satisfying. And it works really
05:26well. Look at that. Look at that. That one wasn't a good one. That was on me. I don't blame Douglas for that.
05:35This is an ashtray. I made this ashtray. I'm not allowed to talk about what I use this ashtray
05:40for apparently. When I moved into my own place, I wanted nice ashtrays around. I smoke a lot. So
05:47it would be good to have good ashtrays around. I found myself buying vintage ashtrays, things like
05:51that. And around the same time, I started doing pottery. And so I started making my own ashtrays.
05:56And I actually hold the patent on this design for an ashtray, which I'm very proud of. I don't know how
06:03many comedians are also patent holders. Can't imagine that many. I wasn't sure I had truly
06:09invented a thing, but I did, it seemed. Or at least the US Patent Office agreed with me that I did.
06:16And so I hold the patent for this design of ashtray, a cylindrical ashtray with a
06:22notch that, you know, is oriented as such in the ashtray. This one is Raku fired, which is a very
06:28temperamental way of firing something. You take it out of the kiln while it's still like red hot.
06:33And then you put it in a bucket with a bunch of newspaper and stuff like that. And it creates
06:37like very unique, specific glaze patterns. And you never quite know what you're going to get,
06:43which is what's kind of cool about it. And also very frustrating about it at times. But I made this
06:48a few years ago and I love how it turned out and I use this every day.
06:56Making Movies by Sidney Lumet. I've probably read seven books in my life.
07:03This is one of them. The other ones being the Bible six times.
07:10You know, the filmmaking process is hard to explain. I think directors especially like to
07:16create an air of mystery and just sort of, you know, mystify the process overall. And this book
07:23by Sidney Lumet, who's one of the all time great filmmakers, he made Dog Day Afternoon,
07:28made Network, The Accused, some of the great films of all time, 12 Angry Men, The Wiz. Come on.
07:36If anyone is ever thinking about making a movie or directing a movie, I cannot recommend they read
07:40this book more. He really breaks down his entire process. And it's not everyone's process, but he
07:45breaks down his process in a way that is so digestible and so methodical and really demystifying.
07:53And it talks about how he creates the tone of his movies and the style of his movies and the look
07:57of his movies. And it was written at a time that maybe isn't our time. So, you know,
08:02don't get mad at me if you read some things in here that maybe you feel are a little outdated.
08:06But in general, there's great stuff in this book and I can't recommend it enough.
08:11These are pottery trimming tools. If you don't do pottery, feel free to fucking zone out now.
08:20But if you do do pottery, when you throw a thing, throw, that's when you make a thing on the pottery
08:25wheel, you form the top. I can show you using this. And if I was to throw this, the bottom of this would
08:33sort of be a lot of excess clay here at the bottom. So what you do is you wait for the thing to dry out
08:38and become what they call leather hard, which sounds like a great porn movie.
08:44It's also this, how, how hard you want your pottery to be and how dry you want your pottery to be
08:51when you trim it. And so what you do is you take your thing and you put it upside down. This is how
08:54you make like the foot of the thing that you have thrown and it spins upside down and you use
09:01trimming tools to trim the excess clay off and shape the foot.
09:06And it's really hard to find good trimming tools and there are companies that make them,
09:10but like ones that are really sharp and very specific shapes are kind of hard to come by.
09:15And again, are made by like people who sell them on Etsy and on their own online shops.
09:20These are called RD. They're very delicate. So if you buy these pottery tools, you have to be very
09:25careful with them because they're made of something called tungsten carbide, which is very sharp,
09:29but incredibly fragile. And it essentially shatters like glass. So if I was to drop this off the table,
09:36for example, it would break, it would shatter, either of these. So you have to take care of
09:40your pottery tools. But if you're looking for good pottery tools, these are the ones to get.
09:48If you do ceramics, then listen up. A bat is a thing you put on the pottery wheel to make your work
09:56easy to remove. And there's a lot of different bats. So you throw a bowl and it's hard to get it off
10:02the wheel if you've thrown it on the wheel. And so you put a thing on the wheel that comes off the
10:06wheel itself. So you're not just fucking with this wet piece of clay that you just made because in
10:11touching it, you can warp it and misshape it, which is what you don't want to do, which is why you have
10:16a bat system. I've gone through many bat systems in my life. I've bought a lot of different bat systems.
10:21This is by far the best bat system. This guy makes them. It's called Shin Tools. The pottery
10:28industry is a weird one because a lot of the tools are very specific and they're not mass produced.
10:33They're made by like individual people who sell them on Etsy. And so this guy sells these on Etsy.
10:37And what's great about this is like it's metal and the way it fits on the wheel is seamless.
10:42And then these you would throw on this thing and then you remove the whole thing and you
10:48it comes with a bunch of these. So if I threw a mug or something, I would, and it like fits
10:54perfect. And these don't warp at all. Cause they're like, you know, titanium or something like that.
10:59And it just fits unbelievably well. It's incredibly flat, comes with a bunch of these when you buy it,
11:04buy even more. If you're a ceramicist looking for a good bat system, I recommend this one.
11:12I got a lot of stuff made by the Japanese on this. Take that as you will. I don't mean to generalize,
11:23but the Japanese make good things. If you're mad about that generalization, fuck you. It's called
11:29a zebra. That's the brand, the pen brand, zebra pen, zebra, zebra makes this pen. I like it because
11:35it's tiny. And as a writer, it's good to have a pen on me, jotting things down. If I'm acting,
11:39I don't always have my phone in my pocket. Sometimes a thing will come up and you want to
11:43really remember it. You want to make a note. You want to hand it to someone. And this is the pen
11:47I choose to have on me, mostly because it's tiny, tiny little pen. It doesn't create a big pen bulge
11:53in your pocket and stick out. It doesn't break. You don't get ink in your pants. It's a good,
11:59solid pen in my good, solid Japanese people.
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