DENVER—It is just two days after what was surely the biggest night in Jonah Hill's young life. The 28-year-old had been rewarded for his work in Moneyball with an Oscar nomination in a year when the other nominees in the best-supporting-actor category sported an average age of 72. Max von Sydow had come out of Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries; Nick Nolte had worked with Terrence Malick on The Thin Red Line; Kenneth Branagh had directed himself to Oscar nominations for Henry V; and Christopher Plummer had played Captain Von Trapp in the iconic The Sound of Music. The highlight of Hill's résumé prior to his nomination had been his work in Superbad.

Hill admits, in a Denver hotel, that he was appropriately awed by it all. “It was great,” he says. “It was really exciting; I got to go with my mom. It was a really surreal night. I felt overjoyed.”

He has come here to promote 21 Jump Street, which he helped adapt from the Vancouver-shot Fox Television series that ran from 1987 to 1991. Not surprisingly, given that Hill cowrote the screenplay (with Michael Bacall), the movie is a comedy. In it, Hill plays Schmidt, a nerdy police-academy graduate who is assigned to go undercover at a local school with the coolest kid from his old high school, Jenko (Channing Tatum). Things have changed in the years since their graduation. Schmidt can relate to the cool kids, while Jenko's assignment calls for him to be a science nerd. The movie opens Friday (March 16).

Hill says that he wasn't thrilled when he was approached to adapt the series to film. “My agent thought it would be funny as a comedy, but I didn't want to adapt a TV show. I kind of rolled my eyes. But I liked the idea of thinking you had all the answers and going back to high school and discovering they were all wrong.”

Tatum, who will have been in five films before the year is out, says that he assumed that if he was getting the call for a movie it would be a drama. Hill, an executive producer on the film, told him it was a comedy but promised him that he would do whatever he could through his writing and producing positions to make Tatum amusing.

“He called me up and said, ‘I want you to read a script,' and I said, ‘Is it a drama?' “, Tatum relates. “And he said, ‘No, it's a comedy,' and he assured me that I would be funny, and I told him that I would blame him if I wasn't. But he really took care of me on it. He said he would be responsible for my performance and that he would make it work for me.”

Hill says he took his producing credit seriously and allows that he is far more interested in having some control of a film than just showing up as an actor for hire. “When you go out to make something, you want it to be great, and you need to put a bubble around it so that no one can get in there with another force field. All you are doing as a producer is allowing your power to protect the integrity of what you are doing. From day one, we [codirectors Phil Lord and Chris Miller and Hill and Bacall] wanted this to be Bad Boys meets a John Hughes movie. A lot of elements could have changed that, but I think we came out with what we intended to do. And that is because we had guys like Channing and I protecting it from being changed.”

His approach to attaining control of his movies could give him a chance at the kind of career longevity achieved by his fellow 2011 Oscar nominees. He is bringing in Moneyball costar Brad Pitt to produce True Story, a drama starring himself and James Franco. And he is going back to his roots in the Judd Apatow troupe to make The Apocalypse, which teams him and Franco with Superbad writers Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, who are scheduled to codirect.

Hill, who has worked with producer-director Apatow on several films, says he learned a lot about making movies watching his mentor. “He said, ‘Don't get arrogant about your ideas and shoot a lot of options so that you don't get stuck with one version of something.' ”

He and cowriter Bacall are also hoping to get at least one sequel out of 21 Jump Street. He admits that control of a sequel can only start when the first film has been a success. “We started writing it, but the movie has to do well before they want to finance it, and we are all still in the midst of making this one work.”

Watch the trailer for 21 Jump Street.