I'd rather do comedies that strike at some bigger ideas.
There's a personal story of my own that I will write at some point, and it's a film that I will happily make. It could very well be the next thing I do, unless someone shows me something great.
The times change, and to the extent that comedy captures the spirit of the times, it will enjoy success.
When someone's an actor and you're an actor, you meet them and you feel like you know them. We're in the same business, and we all speak the same comedy language.
I made a handshake agreement with my best friend in college, Michael Shamberg, who is now a movie producer. We used to write shows together, and we said, "Let's only do what's fun. Let's never take a job where we have to dress up in a suit."
I'd like to think I'd never do a gratuitous fart joke.
Chicago still remains a Mecca of the Midwest - people from both coasts are kind of amazed how good life is in Chicago, and what a good culture we've got. You can have a pretty wonderful artistic life and never leave Chicago.
The first comedy screenplay that I wrote was Animal House and I always thought I could and should be a director but no one was about to give me that opportunity on Animal House.
Multiplicity was a movie that tested really well. People seeing the movie really liked it, but then the studio couldn't market it. We opened on a weekend with nine other films.
I've tried to stay away from mild satire. I want an audience to feel something more powerful for their ten bucks. If they're going to spend two hours with me, and trust me to lead them around, I'd like to take them someplace special.
I realized that my righteous indignation was a form of entertainment for me. I loved getting pissed off at injustice. I didn't do anything about it, I just liked the feeling of being pissed off.
Analyze This is a good movie because Robert De Niro and Billy Crystal are really good. But without the material to put on the play, of course, they couldn't be good. For me, it starts with the writing.
I've got to find a compromise where I don't feel compromised. I've got to find something equally good that they don't feel uncomfortable with. At a certain point, it's no longer about what I thought was right, but it's about this new discovery that happens with the actors. It's nice when the actor is also a writer.
At a certain point, you have to convince the actors that you've done the right thing. The way I work, if I can't convince them, I've got to move on. I can't coerce them or browbeat them.
You can't love somebody into a state of mental health. A lot of people get into serious relationships thinking they're going to heal someone with their love and attention, but it doesn't usually work out that way.
When you're a big enough part of the process that the Writers Guild gives you a lot of credit, that's a good thing. It tells me that I've had a significant impact on the film as a writer.
It's a great luxury for me to be able to write on the films that I direct, and kind of a nice thing to be able to write enough to get credit, which is difficult for a director.
I always think that the writer is doing the vast majority of the director's work, in a sense. If you're a writer who is also going to direct, you're doing all your preparation: You're already visualizing everything, you're imagining how the lines are going to be read, you see the blocking in your head, and you know the rhythm and the pacing.
I can't imagine a successful comedy movie without a successful comedy performance at the heart of it.
When you're young and you first see the extent and depth of the world's hypocrisy, it's fun to go after it. But by the time you're sixty, it's so commonplace. What's the point in ridiculing people anymore? Their existence itself is a sort of sick joke.
Groundhog Day was pretty clean. It may have to do with some puritanical feeling that comedy is a forbidden pleasure in a certain way. They make you laugh, and laughter is somehow an inferior emotion to tragedy.
Somebody once told me that if you laugh at a George Bush joke, or you send an email cartoon to your friends that makes Bush look like a fool, you feel like you've done something significant. But really, what have you actually done? Just expressing contempt for your leaders doesn't really accomplish anything.
Most comedy is not very ambitious. You probably can't name more than a handful of comedies that would qualify for Best Picture.
The comic edge of Ghostbusters will always be the same. It's still treating the supernatural with a totally mundane sensibility. In the world of ghostbusting, there are certain givens. You're always going to have some new invented technology, some pseudo-science that sounds right because we drop enough familiar terms from physics and engineering, and pseudo-methodology, something that people will think they may have read something about before.
Parents tell us things to protect us, or they educate us from their own misinformation or misconceptions.
