Judd Apatow’s quiet connection to indie-rock finally lands on screen with a doc about Eels frontman E
Judd Apatow has always had a pretty deep relationship with music running alongside the comedy.
A lot of his work – especially Freaks and Geeks – is basically a love letter to late-’70s to ’90s rock culture, and he’s been pretty open over the years about being the kind of fan who actually listens beyond the surface-level hits.
What’s slightly more interesting here isn’t that he likes indie rock, though, it’s the specific connection to E.
Apatow didn’t just come to this project cold. E appeared in his Netflix series Love, and Apatow has also talked about being a fan of Everett’s memoir Things the Grandchildren Should Know.
So this feels less like a sudden “Judd discovers indie rock” moment and more like a long-gestating admiration finally turning into something concrete.
That context matters when you look at the newly announced documentary The Way I Was Made: The Story of a Man Called E, revealed on March 26, 2026.
On the surface, it’s a music documentary about Mark Oliver Everett – better known as E, the creative force behind Eels – but the people attached suggest something more personal and long-tail than a standard career overview.
The film is being produced by Apatow alongside Robert Schwartzman (Rooney, Utopia), with Gus Black directing.
Black has spent years working in and around this exact lane, directing music videos for artists including Phoebe Bridgers, Sheryl Crow, and Eels themselves. It’s currently in production under the Utopia banner.
The focus is Everett’s life and catalogue, which have always been tightly interwoven.
His story is shaped by a series of early family losses he has written about in detail in his memoir — the death of his father, physicist Hugh Everett III, when he was 19, followed in quick succession by the deaths of his sister by suicide and his mother from cancer.
Rather than treating that history as background texture, the documentary looks set to sit directly inside it, tracing how those experiences fed into his songwriting and ultimately shaped records like ‘Beautiful Freak’ and ‘Electro-Shock Blues,’ two of the most emotionally defining releases in the Eels discography.
Alongside that, the project will include archival footage, previously unseen performances, and unreleased material spanning Everett’s early years in Virginia through to his time in Los Angeles.
In that sense, Apatow’s involvement starts to feel less surprising.
He’s not stepping into a new scene so much as following a thread that’s been there for years — through Everett’s acting appearance in Love, through the memoir he’s publicly admired, and now into a full documentary that pulls the story together on screen.
As Apatow put it when discussing the project: “I’ve always thought E’s story would make for a fantastic documentary. I am confused by why it has taken this long.”
