Nothing is funnier than confidently doing the wrong thing.
The easiest time to be funny is during a fairly serious situation. That way you can break the ice.
We're always looking for the backbone, the central idea, and once you have that you know everything can circle around it.
Benito Mussolini created the word 'fascism.' He defined it as 'the merging of the state and the corporation.' He also said a more accurate word would be 'corporatism.' This was the definition in Webster's up until 1987 when a corporation bought Webster's and changed it to exclude any mention of corporations.
All we have is our vote. But it's powerful.
You have to be able to fail with the improv. You have to not care.
Creative freedom is a huge carrot.
Old man with an old phone. That's never not funny.
The one thing for sure is, I don't ever want to waste a movie. I don't ever want to waste effort.
Most of what's tricky about comedy is the perception of it and the audience's expectation.
Everyone is sort of in their own little area counting lines and no one talks when film's not rolling. There's constantly actors coming to me back behind the monitor screaming at me, "Why did my line count drop?" It's a nasty tense environment.
All you can really do as director is sort of set a tone.
When you screen it the first couple times, you're just trying to get the movie to work, trying to get the story to flow, trying to find out where your areas are where you have enough breath to laugh a little bit. So you're doing that the first two or three screenings, and then finally, you dial the movie in and it's working, and at that point, it's 50/50 as far as what's funny and what's working. Sometimes you'll put something in and it will just die so hard that it'll almost kill the movie.
David O. Russell is probably my favorite filmmaker. He's not only a great director, but he's also a great writer.
If you make action movies, the critics will savage you, and then your movies are outdated the following week with the new wave of special effects.
There are many aspects to directing that have a romantic place in people's minds.
The idea of 24-hour news, if you really step back, is pretty insane. Just even saying '24-hour news' almost has satire laced in it.
I think American culture had just become so disengaged from the process of government, and we'd been so fuzzed out by our pop culture around us, that I don't think people really saw this guy for what he was.
There's nothing the people love more than a Federal Reserve joke.
For a documentary it's so important to find the characters and to find people who will give you access to film
There's such an aggressively apolitical movement in the US that anything that smells of being political - even the term "political" is so ridiculous, when you think about it. The worst part of governing, the political side, is the grossest part, so that's what they call it. So anything that reeks of that immediately gets tuned out by 70 percent of the population.
I got the sense that Alabama is a place where people don't want handouts and don't much care for people talking out of the side of their mouth.
Can anything good come of a backward way of thinking like judging someone based on skin color? No way.
The easiest time to be funny is during a fairly serious situation. That way, you can break the ice. It's crazy, but even at funerals, people will get huge laughs.
Hollywood is for-profit, is what Hollywood is. All the studios are owned by big, megacorporations that are the furthest thing from liberal you can possibly imagine.
