The comic impulse is sometimes a reaction to sadness. You feel like you can make one choice or the other.
I try to measure the amount of truth in a work rather than just looking at the generic distinction between comedy and drama.
I have tons of rescuing fantasies based on the movies I saw when I was growing up. I wanted to be Robin Hood and the Three Musketeers and the Scarlet Pimpernel.
I'm sure that the liability for doing a tracheotomy would be tremendous. You make one mistake, and it's over. Most doctors won't even do it.
The trick with sequels is, you have to give people what they liked before, yet be innovative enough so they don't feel like they're seeing the same movie.
The child says, "Well geesh, the institutions that I'm supposed to respect - the church and the government - they're telling me things that don't appear to be true. Either I'm crazy or they're crazy." That creates the Absurd Child. The Absurd Child is one who says, "Well, I think they're crazy." So you live in this state of alienation from your culture and your society and your family because you see this rampant bullshit around you.
Some people have a fear of rejecting all the security that comes with family, church and state. They become fundamentalists.
Once you're alienated, you're on your own. That takes you to the world of the existential, where things just kind of float.
A friend of mine is trying to do a documentary where he brings Jewish and Arab comedians to occupied territories in Israel. He wants to do shows as a way of finding some comedic common denominator. When he proposed the idea to one of the officials at the Jenin refuge camp, the guy just stared at him and said, "This is not a joke to us. We don't think that laughing is the answer."
For me, most comedy scripts fail in the mechanical playing-out of the setup. They'll pay lip service to a moral lesson or a psychological progression.
I did a comedy with Al Franken about his character Stuart Smalley, which was really about alcoholism and addiction and codependency. It had some painful stuff in it. When we showed it to focus groups, some of them actually said, "If I want to see a dysfunctional family, I'll stay home."
I'm thinking of doing a marital comedy for one of the studios, but I want it to be so painful that it'll have a profound effect on married couples who see it together.
I loved writing and performing, but the idea of doing it for a living seemed so remote. But I eventually let it devolve to the point where it was the only thing I could do.
When you grow up in Chicago, your whole family is counting on you to go to college and do something distinguished. The last thing you're thinking is that you're going to make a career in show business.
I want to explore marriage without the usual Hallmark Card platitudes. Life is difficult, and I like movies that acknowledge that.
The rule of thumb for a director or producer - which prevents them from just sticking their names on everything - is that you have to contribute substantially more than 50 percent of the character dialogue and story.
I had developed a survival skill of using my wit to score for myself. If a scene was dying, I'd lob in these little bombshell lines that would get me some attention and a laugh without really helping the scene.
I've always had that overweening desire to be liked by the audience.
When a director writes, there's a compulsory arbitration. You have a right to challenge any of the arbitrators, but they pick three of four arbitrators who read all the drafts with no names attached and then allocate credit.
As an actor, you're completely at the mercy of other people. You basically go begging for the opportunity to work. As a writer, at least nobody can tell me what to do. I can write what I want. I might not sell it, but at least I'm in control.
I'm a writer-director-actor, which I've always kind of enjoyed. I compared it to the Olympic biathlon. "Not only can he cross-country ski, but he's a terrific marksman as well." I want people to say, "You mean that writer performed a tracheotomy?" That's right, I do everything.
There's something very edgy about Bill Murray out there improvising.
I think satire is a luxury of literate middle-class people. People who are well fed and relatively secure in their beds can laugh at their troubles. They can enjoy sitcoms. For those who aren't quite so lucky, well, the irony might be lost on them.
I think of myself as a real writer, not just someone who dabbles in it, so I deserve some credit.
My only conclusion about structure is that nothing works if you don't have interesting characters and a good story to tell.
