Collaborative Process Quotes

My most frequent collaborators at S.N.L. are the incredibly gifted writers Chris Kelly and Sarah Schneider!

The directing is something that is incredibly satisfying to me and challenging to me because it's asking me to draw on everything I've been able to absorb over all these years of acting and having all this set experience.

I played more of an advisory role with Public Enemy. I really trusted them to make the music that they wanted to make, and the way The Bomb Squad worked with the... they created their whole own world of music.

I could never work in that kind of commercial environment where the stars have a lot to say, where the producers kind of push you around and tell you who to cast and who not to cast. I'm just not interested in that at all.

Making a record is an intimate experience. A good producer can get things out of you that you can't get out of yourself.

I view the whole thing as a collaboration. As an actor, I always found that to be the most freeing thing, when the director would collaborate with you, so that together you'd come up with something exponentially better.

I'm not a big equipment guy; I think that people are a little bit shocked by that. I really don't care about gear in general. I care about people and their intentions to make music - it doesn't matter what equipment you have.

I believe in giving actors the freedom to express themselves, and adding more to whatever is written.

It's really fun to go back and forth from acting projects to directing projects. You don't have as much responsibility when you're acting, but you have more fun. But then you miss having that responsibility, and so you go back and torture yourself and make a movie.

I love doing stand-up. It's so self-contained - you go there, you do it, you go home - but with telly, there are too many people involved with it with opinions. You have a product, and everyone wants to change it.

I never want to be the producer that I too often got.

Everyone wants the same thing in this band, so we definitely respect each other. I mean, all of us have had hit songs, so it's a band full of people who really know what they're talking about, so you have to respect that even when you think something you have might be great, and they go, 'Man, it's not as great as you think it is.'

It was a challenge, to work with Oliver Stone.

With movies, so much of it is, 'Who is the human being that is going to be directing it?' Because it is their medium. In a way, you are serving the director, and when it is someone that you feel you can have a lot of confidence in, it can make a big difference.

I know it sounds earnest, but I do really feel in my bones that acting is just a small part of the equation when you are making a movie. The director really is in charge. Actors are as important or unimportant as the rest of the people around them.

If you believe that how you do your work is as influential as the work you do, then a theatre rehearsal, which is a microcosm of the world, is the perfect place to model social change because if it doesn't work this time, you can try again on the next production.

A film is not done by one person. It's done by a lot of people. I love this whole collaborative aspect. When it works well, you end up with something better than any of us started out to do.

My dad always produces, and I would always sit in producers' meetings with him. I like the whole thing of putting a movie together. I think that's very exciting.

Jay Z and Biggie and Nas always listened to my direction. They listened and they applied it and I also listened to their opinions and that's why the records came out so good.

Obviously, if a director doesn't communicative a clear, relevant vision of the material, it will not succeed no matter how good the material.

If it's something I feel I can do alright, I like being in those, and some that I think Rob Schneider and David Spade would be funnier at than me, I tell them to do it. I don't have any clue how we decide. There's this thing, this "Click", actually, one of my friends called me up, my partner told me about this idea that Steve Koren had. Steve Koren, by the way, the guy who wrote it with Mark O'Keefe, Steve Koren I've known since I was 22. He was a page at Saturday Night Live.

Working on a play is a vibrant and collaborative business. Everyone from the choreographer to the music director to the director to the writers work together toward the same goal, and everyone chimes in on everything.

I'll always work with my collaborator in the room so I have a reaction on a note-by-note basis. I know in my gut when something works for me, and I'll fight for it, but I'm a very easy re-writer.

I brought a lot of my own pieces of clothes to the design room when I first met with the design team just so they could see what my style was like.

The key is you don't want to control the controlled stuff too much and you don't want to be too free flowing in uncontrolled situations. That can be a contentious issue with some directors. The joy of my career is I've gotten to work with great directors who get that balance.