Comedy Filmmaking Quotes

I always think of comedy as being spontaneous, and yet everything about filmmaking is not spontaneous.

What's nice about a lot of Wes Anderson's films is that there's a patience to it. I think that patience brings out a lot more funny things that you would miss otherwise if you just had to make quick cuts and keep the pace, whatever that pace is that bigger budget comedies have to have.

I hope I don't just do the exact same thing my whole life. I also feel like it's really hard to make comedy. It's almost impossible for comedy filmmakers and directors to stay relevant as they get older.

A perfect movie is a different thing, but a funny movie is easy. I was really happy that I got everyone that I got. Everybody got to play to their strengths and was paired up in the right scenarios. It was very fortunate. It was exciting, the whole process. It makes more difficulty in editing 'cause there's more footage, but the guy I had handle it was a documentarian editor for a long time, so it was very useful.

I like what a third man brings. A kind of oblique vision, seeing something in the material that you didn't know was there. As a comedian, I'm always listening to the audience. And in movies, sometimes the only audience you have is the producer and the director. I like having someone else's opinion, especially if you're on the same wavelength.

I started in high school, and in college, I studied radio, TV, and film. The plan was to be a filmmaker, and it was always comedy.

Comedy is all about the joke. Comedies usually don't do anything fancy with the camera [or] the lighting. It doesn't matter. It should never be fancy.

Even though 'Spider-Man' is a huge blockbuster, it really didn't feel like that. It felt like we were making this weird, funny high school movie. Like just hanging out with a group of friends.

I don't know what I'd do if I was making a romantic comedy; I wouldn't feel like I was earning my $100 a day.

Everything in comedy's got to be exactly right, which is why making a comedic film is kind of a difficult process, because, for most of the two years of shooting it and editing it and reshooting and all of that, it's not quite right. And it's only when you just at the end, you put the final polish on it, it becomes really funny again.

It's always exciting to be a part of the development and creative process, and I hope to continue to do it. I feel like, especially in the comedic world, it's how things have to be done. You have to be a part of the motivating factor of getting the movie made. It's so hard.

You always draw on your experiences with live audiences to know how to do comedy on films. You're working for a laugh that may or may not come six months later, but you're working in a vacuum at the time you are doing it.

When Broken Lizard writes a movie, we reject everything that doesn't have five guys as leads, so it needs to be cops or a basketball team; that's what we can do.

I really think more about being honest and truthful about feelings and how people behave for the movies that I direct, but I also love movies like Zohan and Anchorman, just balls to the wall, how much can you make people laugh in one 90 minute period.

I think when I was getting into directing, or wanting to be a director, when I was a teenager, the two films that really inspired me were Raising Arizona and Evil Dead II. And in the case of the former, I thought, "Wow. Why don't all comedies look like this?" And then as I started doing comedy, particularly when I started doing it on TV...

I can understand that an audience, buying a ticket to see a picture of mine, wants to see something funny because they feel confident that at least I have a fighting chance to make a funny film when I make a film, whereas if I make a dramatic film there's one chance in a thousand that it's really going to come out great, so I understand how they feel about that and they're completely right.

Actually the hardest films to make are comedies. In normal life, funny things happen by accident; to re-create those by design in a film takes real technique.

David Zucker was great! Those guys are funny. I mean, they are funny. There's a wonderful thing about doing that kind of work like Superhero Movie: You have to be real, but you also have to get the laugh. There you are, your director and the producers are right there at the monitors, and you either get the laugh or you don't. And so you just do it until you get the laugh.

As a director, you can't stop a guy if he thinks something's hysterical, because if you do, then he'll get depressed because he thinks he didn't come up with a good joke. So if a guy's going on some run and it's killing him, and he thinks it's hilarious, you gotta do enough so that he thinks you can use it in the movie.

With comedies, I like to be a producer, because comedies can get corny and go off track real fast.

With comedies, it's been very gratifying to be able to clock in, laugh all day, and then clock out.

It is important to have a woman editor. Movie is an industry where it is predominantly women. Male editors might cut out pauses that are interesting, while a woman might not be afraid of that pause. Trying to do a movie with an editor who is not funny is impossible. There are certain talents that go with certain genders.

With 'Trainwreck,' because it wasn't live and we could do more takes, I feel like we broke a lot.

Obviously, my stuff has been more in the comedy realm, and I really believe that if I'm laughing behind the camera, then I think the film will be funnier.

I'm very drawn to subversive comedy like Alexander Payne and Jason Reitman. But at the end of the day, if you want to do great work, you have to pay your dues.