Also, just as her on-screen attempts at a tentative romance with a surgeon (Bill Hader) force her character to learn to trust, Schumer's creative partnership with Apatow pushed her to do something scary: allow someone to help take care of her.

"On my TV show, I have the final say on everything. In my stand-up, I've got no one, no boss," Schumer says. "So trusting him was a constant exercise, and he was very patient with me." During sleepless nights, she'd fire off frantic emails cross-checking that they weren't reducing her character to a slut or a drunk.

For Apatow, it was easier to "till someone else's soil," as he recently put it on Pete Holmes' podcast You Made It Weird, than to continue plowing his own life for material. "I think from working with Lena, I thought I could understand Amy," he says. "And Amy's playing someone who's in her early 30s, so in a way it's a story that almost begins where Girls ends."

Initially he just wanted to guide Schumer through the process of getting her first film made. He wasn't planning to direct Trainwreck himself. He's never directed anyone else's script. Yet slowly he realized that, unlike Bridesmaids and Superbad, he didn't want to hand over Schumer's story to another director. That is, if Schumer was game. Says Apatow, "I didn't want to force myself on her!"

Now Schumer is in Apatow's expanded family portrait, alongside Dunham and the cast of Bridesmaids.

"She's a great voice for 'Fuck you, I want to say this!'0x2009" Apatow says. "I think you can almost see the progression of Tina and Amy and Mindy and Lena and Amy now — that first Amy is Poehler."

While it might seem odd that Apatow, the man who popularized man-children, is one of the driving forces behind the new surge of female-driven comedies, his celebration of strong, fascinating woman is nothing new.

Apatow himself hasn't changed — he's just never gotten enough credit for being a feminist.

"I loved Gilda Radner as much as I loved Bill Murray as a kid," he says. "I didn't understand there was a difference between them." The comedian who first inspired 9-year-old Apatow to take the stage was a one-legged, wheelchair-using woman named Totie Fields. At 22, he was writing jokes for Roseanne and learning about stretch marks. At home, his world is ruled by Venus. He's had almost two decades of marriage to grumble about the bad roles that get sent to his wife, and now that his lovely daughters are old enough to be into make-up, he reminds them that a personality matters more than being pretty.

Apatow attacks misogyny, even when it comes from the comedy legends who shaped him. At times, his entire Twitter feed is a one-man assault on Bill Cosby ("He's clearly insane") whose records spun through his childhood. And when Jerry Lewis said that he preferred to think of women as "a producing machine that brings babies in the world," Apatow took the stage at the Critics Choice Awards and groaned, "I'd like to say, with all respect, fuck you."

On the surface, Knocked Up and The 40-Year-Old Virgin look like celebrations of immaturity. But Apatow is more interested in turning his boys into men. ("It would be weird if the first movie I wrote was all about the issues of a woman because I'm a young idiot," Apatow says of his first four films.) His heroes grow up, even if that means growing past their idiot friends. In a city that celebrates eternal youth, he doesn't identify with the Peter Pans. He wed one of his first serious girlfriends, quickly had children and settled into domesticity. As he confessed to the Hollywood Reporter, "I had zero wild years. I had a wild week, maybe."

He adds, "It takes decades of being married and having two daughters and being around a lot of women to begin to understand 1 percent of what their perspective is."

In college, Lena Dunham bought into the outcry that Knocked Up was sexist for making Katherine Heigl's character a humorless shrew. As she told GQ in 2013, "It was what was cool to do, just like I was always doing sit-ins for causes I didn't understand." Today, after four years of late-night Skype calls with Apatow and conversations about their insecurities, she sticks up for her producer, writer and friend.

"He's this incredibly sensitive, emotional creature whose comedy is always, at its root, about love and all its complexities," Dunham says. "Judd roots for humanity, for romance, for the idea that people can grow and change."