Over the last three years, Seth Rogen has been on fire. Throw James Franco into the mix and you have two of the hottest actors in Hollywood. Sprinkle in some action, comedy, and a few bags of weed, and Rogen and Franco are sparking fire in a completely different way in Pineapple Express. After smoking a killer batch of weed known as Pineapple Express, Rogen's Dale Denton witnesses a murder and takes drug dealer Franco with him on the run to evade the cops who have traced the murder to both stoners through the exclusive strain of super-ganja. Why Pineapple Express wasn't released on April 20 (4/20), we still can't figure out.

At the film's recent press junket, Seth Rogen and James Franco kicked back with journalists and sparked up discussion on Pineapple Express, how they nabbed Huey Lewis for the soundtrack, and putting the "green" in Rogen's upcoming translation of Green Hornet.

Seth what was the idea behind writing this?

SETH ROGEN: The original idea came from Judd [Apatow] actually. He just kind of had the loose notion of, "What about a weed action movie?" And me and Evan [Goldberg] thought that could be a rad. Basically, we started out thinking if we could make a movie that was a weed movie and an action movie and had like a real kind of friendship story to it, then that would be our favorite movie ever. We originally wrote Franco’s part for me and the part I ultimately played just for someone else in general and then when we got Franco involved. We thought it would be a good idea to just switch the roles and, yeah, I think it works really well.

James this is not normally something we would expect to see you do and how did this come to you and why did you say yes?

JAMES FRANCO: Yeah, I hadn’t done a comedy in awhile and I directed a very low budget movie called The Ape and it was playing in a festival in Austin and Judd was there, and he came and saw it and it’s kind of funny. But after he...

ROGEN: I thought it was funny.

FRANCO: Thank You. After he saw it he said, "I miss the funny Franco," because I hadn’t really done a comedy other than The Ape since Freaks and Geeks. So then we started talking about ideas and he said, "Well, I’m gonna do this movie Knocked Up with Seth, but after that that you know you guys should do a movie together." I read it, thought it was very funny, but I said, "Ah, Seth, you get to play the good role, or the role I want, Saul." And they’re like, "Nah, you can play Saul." Then I think around that time I met David [Gordon Green] on the set of Superbad and Judd said, "I’m thinking about having him direct." And it sounded like a good idea.

You played the same character as this in Knocked Up, in the fact that they’re both pot smokers. Is this method acting or... Have you had a close encounter?

ROGEN: I guess so, I mean, no, it’s - I mean I don’t smoke weed on set all day and I’m just saying that, I guess. Not all day. You know, after lunch you get tired. What can you do? But to me the fact that a character smokes weed isn’t really what I hang my hat on necessarily. You know, to me Arthur and James Bond aren’t the same because they both drink. So I would say - You know, I would kind of equate it to that. They’re different guys, but they both have a similar habit. But to me they’re very different guys.

Can you talk about action scenes? It’s not exactly what we expect from you and you fractured your finger?

ROGEN: Yeah, well, we really wanted it to be an action movie. Those are the movies we love. We’re big fans of Shane Black movies when we were younger, me and Evan. You know, Die Hard and Paul Verhoeven movies and shit like that. So those were the movies we always wanted to make. You know, Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs, the kinds of movies where violence and comedy and characters kind of work together really well, and it was a great time. Yeah, we hurt ourselves, Franco cracked his face open, [Danny] McBride cracked the back of his head open, I punched Amber [Heard] in the face just to get her in the mood for things... [laughs] But it was a lot of fun, I loved it.

I appreciate that you brought Huey Lewis back to the world of movie soundtracks. Can you talk about that inspiration?

ROGEN: Yeah. You know, we made this movie and it was kind of like a - I would say somewhat of a homage to '80s action movies and, in it’s own way, an' 80s action movie itself. And we thought, "What’s the one thing every great '80s movie had?" A song by Huey Lewis that says the title of the movie and I was actually singing it in my head as we were editing the movie. I just wrote a version as I was driving to the editing room. I was just kind of saying, "Pineapple Express." And I ran it by these guys and I said, "You know what would be crazy? If we could get Huey Lewis to do a song for this." And for some reason I thought that would be unattainable. It was way easier. [laughs] Two days later we had a song by Huey Lewis. I didn’t realize you could just call him up and he’d be like, "Okay."

James, your outfit was amazingly accurate from what’ve seen. How did the clothes affect the performance and did you base this guy on anybody you know?

FRANCO: Accurate? I guess it was originally based on somebody I wasn’t allowed to meet just because - Then we don’t have any changes in the movie. So picking the right outfit was fairly important. I wasn’t a fan of the Guatemalan pants, but I was convinced I should wear that, and then the t-shirt is a special creation by David Gordon Green. There’s a kitten sitting in a shark’s mouth, but he’s happy about it. Once I had that outfit Saul just came alive.

James, you said Saul was the part you wanted. So did you take any inspiration from the great characters like Spicoli?

FRANCO: Yeah, I watched a lot of pot movies before we did this and my favorites were always like movies where the characters in movies that weren’t necessarily stoner movies. So Spicoli is in Fast Times, which isn’t exactly a stoner movie, or The Big Lebowski, which is I think of more than a stoner movie, or Brad Pitt in True romance. I don’t know. They’re somehow like goofy stoner guys, but there’s something more going on I guess. So maybe that’s kind of the inspiration that they gave me.

Seth, I take it there isn’t any pot smoking in The Green Hornet.

ROGEN: We put the green in The Green Hornet. [laughs] No there isn’t at all actually.

What is the progress of that script?

ROGEN: We’re done the script, we’re gonna make it. We've got a release date - June 25th, 2010. So mark your calendars, you guys are getting pretty busy. But it was actually helpful having made this movie in the writing of another kind of action movie with a lot of action in it. We learned just how specific you can or can’t be. And in getting The Green Hornet writing job, we actually showed them some scenes from Pineapple in the pitch, literally, and we’re just like, "Look, we can write action scenes." [laughs]

Do you have to be more disciplined to write something like The Green Hornet as opposed to something like this, where you can be a lot more free?

ROGEN: No, not necessarily. Luckily the MPAA decided that violence is fine and when you’re doing an action movie you can really have as much violence as you want. So in writing The Green Hornet we have not hit many situations where you’re like, "You know what would make this scene better? If Kato said c**ksucker." That hasn’t come up many times, but I’d say action-wise we’ve been able to do everything that we could’ve ever wanted.

What did you like about The Green Hornet?

ROGEN: To us it was just this funny notion that when you say The Green Hornet to people, the first thing anyone says is, "Hey, Bruce Lee played Kato in that show," and we always wanted to make this like, hero sidekick movie. That was always this unexplored area to us, and for years we were trying to write a movie that was about a hero and his sidekick. Then when we heard The Green Hornet movie was up for grabs. We thought that could be the most perfect way to do this story because he is kind of the only hero who’s sidekick is actually more known than he is. We thought it would be a good way to tell this story and just do a big crazy action movie, basically.