Joel (Jason Bateman) is a well-meaning factory owner dealing with lawsuits and employees like Step (Clifton Collins Jr.) in Mike Judge's film Extract. (Maple Pictures)

By 1999, Mike Judge had created, voiced, written and drawn two animated mega-hits for TV: Beavis and Butt-head and King of the Hill. Looking for a new challenge, he came up with Office Space, a hilarious live-action feature about the rage-filled personnel at a fictional IT company. Judge based his workplace alienation comedy on his own experiences as a temp alphabetizing purchase orders (a bleak task replicated to comic effect in the film). Office Space was a box-office bomb, but sold over 2.5 million copies on DVD.

Ten years later, Judge returns to the 9-to-5 world with the film Extract. Set in a flavour-extract factory, the movie stars Jason Bateman as a head honcho who has to deal with lawsuits, malcontent employees and a failing marriage. During a recent promotional visit to Toronto, Judge talked to CBCNews.ca about being a boss himself, why the workplace is such fertile ground for comedy and the infinite appeal of stupidity.

Director Mike Judge. (Getty Images)

Q: A decade after Office Space, you've returned to a workplace setting in Extract. What is it about the workplace that appeals to you as a satirist?

A: Partly it's because there's not a lot of that done, so it feels kind of fresh. I also think work is such a huge part of people's lives; it's not acknowledged all the time in movies and TV shows. I remember when I was a kid, in the '80s especially, thinking people on TV seem to have endless cash, they always live in a house you think they could never afford. I remember my sister would read these Nancy Drew books and she would tell me about how Nancy Drew would hop on a plane, and we're thinking, Who paid for the ticket? Where is this money coming from?

And when I'd be sitting around with my friends, we'd be talking about people we worked with. I did a lot of imitations — I think my imitation abilities peaked in my late teens, early 20s. I hardly ever imitated people on TV, it was always people that I knew, people I worked with. So there are a lot of reasons.

Q: How would you describe the relationship between Extract and Office Space?

A: Extract is almost like a companion piece to Office Space. It's almost as if the main character in Office Space [Peter Gibbons, played by Ron Livingston] quit that job, and then figured out a way to start a factory and then hated being a boss — although he actually ends up liking being a boss. I kind of based it on my experience with Beavis and Butt-head. Before that happened, I'd always been the employee, I never had one person working for me. Suddenly I had as many as 90 people working for me, when the show got big. I was thinking, these people don't appreciate anything, they take advantage of me when I try to be nice. I just realized, they're like I was when I was an employee. I suddenly became sympathetic to my old bosses.

Q: Jason Bateman's character is obviously a more benevolent boss than Gary Cole in Office Space, who played the evil Lumbergh.

A: Yes, Jason's character just wants to make extract. Managers like Gary Cole in Office Space actually like having people underneath them for the sake of having people underneath them, for the power trip of it. They enjoy telling people what to do, even if there's no real purpose to it. [When I was the boss] on Beavis and Butt-head, I really did like seeing the project through, making it good and having a challenge and all that stuff. What I didn't enjoy is telling people what to do when they don't want to do it, and telling people to come in on time, that kind of stuff. But that goes with the territory.

Q: The workplace in Extract seems to have a lot more soul than the workplace in Office Space.

A: Yeah, that's a good way of putting it. I also think that the workplace in Extract is a healthier environment because you're making this product — the guy who started it is right there. The thing I didn't like about these corporate jobs is you're working for someone like Lumbergh. Half the time you don't know what you're really making — the shareholders are in some other town and you're stuck with this middle management person, and it's just not a healthy environment.

Q: You don't shy away from showing stupid characters. Can you talk about stupidity as a theme in your work? You seem to embrace it in a more extreme way than other filmmakers.

A: There's a long tradition going all the way back to The Three Stooges, or even before that. I've been trying to figure that out, why stupid characters can be a lot more interesting than smart ones. I've seen movies where there'll be a smart guy and you can just see that a writer sat there with an encyclopedia and loaded this guy up with all this knowledge. I just don't care.

I keep thinking of the movie Badlands, which I loved. I saw it a hundred times, and it occurred to me at some point, Martin Sheen's character is doing awful things but he's just a dumbass, he's just a dumb guy. To me, for some reason, that's just way more interesting than watching a guy on a cellphone saying, "You have exactly five minutes or the girl dies!" and there's some clever plot. To me, clever can get a little boring sometimes. I mean clever where everybody has a snappy comeback, it's like a writer sat there for two hours thinking of some line a character could say off the cuff that doesn't sound off the cuff, because nobody talks like that. What's interesting to me is making things seem real. To me, Beavis and Butt-head sometimes seem liberating because you think, If only I was dumb enough to just not care.

Q: Self-deluded characters have always been funny, going to back to Moliere and Shakespeare.

A: Yes, there's this project I'm working on next called Brigadier Gerard, based on these stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, so it was written about one hundred years ago. It's just a really funny character, like Inspector Clouseau. He thinks he's great and wonderful and smart — he's completely self-deluded.

Q: Your previous films, Idiocracy and Office Space, both did much better on DVD than in theatres. What are your expectations with Extract? Obviously, you're not trying to make a cult movie.

A: Yeah, I'm not trying to make cult movies, it just turned out that way. With Extract, I think it's a similar movie to Office Space; it almost could play on a double feature.

They had a 10-year anniversary party for Office Space in Austin earlier this year. It was fun and just seeing all the fans for that movie, I think there might be a lot of Office Space fans out there who'd go to see Extract. I make a movie that I think is good, I try to do my job as a filmmaker and what happens after that is up to the distributors. There's not much I can do about that. They made a good trailer for Extract, so hopefully people will go see it in theatres.

Extract opens on Sept. 4.

Greig Dymond writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.