With the internet's squeal of delight from when Ron Burgundy announced Anchorman 2 still echoing in our ears, the Hollywood Reporter has a solid interview with director Adam McKay about how the sequel's shaping up and how—after years of stalled-out attempts—it finally ended up with a greenlight. The whole thing's worth a read.

That’s always the trick with the sequels, is how much do you repeat from the first one. Because we all get bummed out when you go see a sequel and it’s beat for beat. And you’re like, Awww… And the spirit of the first one was such a three-chord garage band kind of spirit. The funny thing is we re-watched it for the first time in four or five years the other day. I had seen pieces of it on TV. But Will and I actually sat and watched the whole movie. When it was over with, we were like, “We’ve gotten a lot better than that!” [laughs]

In what sense? Didn’t you guys laugh at all?

Oh, no, we laughed the whole way through! We just meant as far as the filmmaking. The next one we did, Talladega Nights, we didn’t do any reshoots on it. We knew exactly what we were doing. Whereas, with Anchorman we were reshooting, we were improvising. Since it was our first movie it was just a little more raggedy and frayed. But that’s also the charm of it. That’s what you kind of like. So when we were talking about writing this, we said, “We almost have to go back to that raggedy, frayed mentality.” It’s like when the Who has to do “My Generation,” you’re like, “They’re way better than that song now,” but yet that’s still one of their great songs. So we have to kind of do that three-chord raggedy song again. We have to force ourselves to do some things we know are going to be risky and might not even work, just because that’s the spirit of the movie.

Read the rest here.