ROBERT BEN GARANT

We joke a lot about how, in Hollywood, the writer is one step below the doormat. That's not self-loathing. That's true!

'Reno' was originally going to be a sketch show, with the cops as a transitional element.

If you have a writing partner that you don't share a work ethic with, it's doomed.

'The State' had never done improv. We used to go over scripts for weeks and argue about every joke. But I don't know how we would have scripted 'Reno.'

The 'Reno' movie is very solid. 'Balls of Fury' I'm pretty disappointed in - I blame myself. People hate both of those movies equally.

Movies are very, very good to me; What do I need TV for?

Paul Rudd's a really weird, silly, silly man. He gets on 'Friends,' and he gets to show, like, one tiny little window of how truly berserk he can be.

You need to learn that, unless your lead character is written in a way that one of the 20 movie stars want to play him, your movie will not get made.

There's a studio formula of making a movie that Betty White fans and Ice Cube fans are going to love, so it's a really broad brush.

'Balls of Fury' was my first time directing, and that's a movie that I think parts of it are great.

It's much easier to get your material out to the public now than it was in 1988, when you basically had to get onto cable to have a joke heard across the country. Now all you need is an iPhone, and you can get your joke heard across the country.

I don't think people realize how many scripts you write that go nowhere.

You write a spec, and you pour your heart and soul and life into a spec, and you think that spec is the movie that's going to sell and get made... I've never heard of anybody that happened to.

'Reno 911: Miami!' is a terrible, terrible title, and all the reviews - good and mostly bad - nobody pointed out how stupid a title that was. But you can hardly come up with a sentence that's more awkward.

Sketch shows change gears so drastically every two minutes. I think sketch shows are for sketch fans; they're not really for everybody.

A lot of times when you're trying to do improv, everybody's doing a different style.

I think our 'Reno' cops are, basically, if you made us make fun of ourselves at a party. That is what we would do. We would do those characters and not really think about it. We didn't develop the characters; everyone just put on a name tag and started improvising.

I never really saw 'The Kids in the Hall' until after we started 'The State.'

If one real working screenwriter had visited us in college and just said, 'This is what my day is like,' it would have been really helpful.

In cop shows, the police don't get to rag on each other and rag on their commander and rag on the person they just pulled over. That was all 'Reno' was, and I think that's all cops do 90 percent of their day.

I go into movies I hate, and that movie will make $500 million.

Most movies were always terrible.

When I walk out of a movie that's actually good, I write emails to anybody I know who was involved with it.

Not a lot of movies have their own feel.

Writing a screenplay's not rocket science, but I was in a bar, and the bartender came up to me and said, 'I saw 'Night at the Museum,' and the thing about him and his kid brought me and my kid together.' Something like that... it's like, 'Oh, right. That's why we're doing it.'