mockumentary style Quotes

I love Modern Family but it's among a handful of favorite shows.

I thought 'Borat' was a breakthrough comedy, because it was really funny. It wasn't some studio-produced script with 14 writers.

'Waiting For Guffman' was different right away from 'Spinal Tap,' because we didn't show the interviewer. That person became invisible immediately. That created a different way of tuning it and ultimately editing it.

I have profound respect for Sacha Baron Cohen, but Borat is not a particularly comfortable movie for me to sit through.

I've always loved improvised movies like Christopher Guest and the 'Spinal Tap' era of comedy.

I've met Jon Glaser who has a show on Adult Swim call Delocated and he's the main writer we hired for the show. That's really my brand of humor, I would say.

I remember once, years ago, I met Sting, and he told me that he had seen 'Spinal Tap' 50 times. He said: 'Every time I watch it, I don't know whether to laugh or cry.'

With 'The Office' and 'Extras' I've always snuck in a little bit of heart and pathos - and drama, which is fun.

'The Office' is an amazing show. So is 'Extras.'

Well, I had always been a fan of 'The Office' and thought the mockumentary style of the show was hilarious. So with 'Parks' taking the same approach, it drew me in right away.

I've gotten to portray things in [Christopher Guest's] movies that I wouldn't have in others.

[The Office] is incredible. It's slightly overwhelming because you don't think that anything you do....having anybody enjoy what you do is such a treat and so I know I've said this a hundred times but we owe it all to our writers.

There's no school that you can go to and learn how to be a "Daily Show" correspondent and how to interview people and, you know, essentially leave your soul outside the door and go in there and kind of, you know, destroy people's lives sometimes.

With mockumentaries, the conceit is that the characters are being interviewed, so you can start a scene and cut to a character looking at the camera and saying, "I'm working on this project," instead of having to figure out ways for people to talk naturally about what they're doing. You see this problem in pilots - people end up explaining things to each other that they'd never explain in real life.

That's what I love about the mockumentary style, is the added thing of people knowing they are on-camera, which changes your behavior. That's why we sometimes do what we call spy shots.