What I do as a director is really create a safe environment that everyone can feel very comfortable in and experiment within so that they don't hold back anything. You never ever want someone to go, 'Oh I shouldn't have done that.' There isn't anything you shouldn't try. If it's terrible, who cares?
I don't want to do anything to revisit Freaks and Geeks that isn't awesome.
What's so great about working with really funny women is that vanity comes second. Whatever makes it real and funny, they're going to go for, and it's just great.
You have to know everything. You have to know how to light a scene. You have to know all this technical stuff about directing. No, you don't. You can know as much or as little as you have to. Your main job is to get great performances and tell the story correctly and capture it correctly. Then it's just basically yours to complicate or simplify as much as you want.
It's healthy to have older friends. You go, 'Look, I'm younger than them!' That's always the nice thing, if you can be the youngest one in the room at times. Like if you're always the oldest one in the room, you'll start to feel like the oldest person in the world. So get older friends, because they're cool. Get cool older friends.
Women's humor seems to be a little more supportive. It's just kind of trying to make the other one laugh through funny voices and kind of talking about other people. I respond to that. I feel less like I'm going to get beat up in a room full of women than I do in a room full of guys.
Bad women's comedies are made by men who didn't consult enough women.
Handheld camera is approximating what we're seeing when we're looking at each other, and kind of looking around, and your eyes whipping around. It adds an immediacy, where you feel like you are watching something through your own eyes, standing there with them. And that just allows you to take more liberties and have more fun with people's behavior.
Who knew there were so many ghosts to be busted in the world?
The greatest way for people to experience a comedy is to go in not knowing anything about it. But because of marketing, it's impossible. Marketing meaning that in order to get people to come you can't just go, 'Hey, there's a great movie - we're not going to show you anything from it but trust us!
The dueling maturity levels in high school is such a source of comedy to me. I was always such a late developer. I was last to walk. I was last to ride a bike. I was last to have sex. That's why it's fun to portray one side of your childhood onscreen.
To me, there's nothing funnier than funny people in peril, because it's just a great springboard for people to be at a heightened emotionality and things get funnier.
'Constitutional' is just a real pip of a word. Positively rolls off the tongue. In fact, it's downright fun to say. 'Con-stit-too-shun-al.' It's the verbal equivalent of skipping down the street with an ice cream cone in your hand. It's like a semantic bag of Lays potato chips. You simply can't just say it once.
At the end of the day, I just want a movie that's great, that people are going to love and laugh at and be affected by, and also have an emotional journey.
I love the pictures of Old Hollywood, seeing the directors dressed in suits and ties. Even the grips would be wearing ties. But the biggest thing is when I was a kid, I couldn't wait to be an adult, and I think what happens with most guys is that no one wants to be an adult anymore. So they're dressing like kids.
If some magic thing happens, and everybody goes completely nuts, and does something we never thought of, the cameras catch everything. That comes from having camera people who are almost like actors and writers themselves.
At the end of the day, successful box office just means that more people saw what you did and liked it, and that to me is the most important thing. That a lot of people saw it and liked it.
Getting away from a white or light colored tuxedo shirt is always a little dangerous. Certain staples shouldn't be mixed with. Light pink or blue is not bad, but again, you're just breaking from a classic.
God does things that fly completely in the face of what we've all been taught that He is supposed to do and every time He does this, we all just say, 'Oh, well, I guess there must be some good reason why He did that.
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.
If you're not connected emotionally to a story, then you're dead. You're really just opening the door for people to lose interest and their minds to wander, for them to start picking it apart.
Hey, I'm like the Wayne Gretsky of the entertainment biz - I have other people do my dirty work while I skate around and get to be a nice guy. What can I say? I'm a coward.
We didn't used to be so precious about women in comedy back in the old days.
When I went to high school, in the late 1970s, disco was in full swing and anyone who was into it dressed the part. I know I did.
"Nuclear" is nothing but trouble. Do you say "new-clear" or do you say "nuke-you-ler"? Whoever invented that word had obviously never studied the human mouth. We don't have enough muscles in our face to make that group of letters come out smoothly. The word is missing a middle syllable, for cryin' out loud.
