Paul feig quotes

In my years of acting, the one thing I was never able to do convincingly was to laugh on camera. Fake-laugh.

Many Republicans have always reminded me of professional WWF wrestlers. They come into the ring all pumped up and acting like they're invincible and that they're going to destroy their opponent. Then they get hit once and fall down and roll around in agony and suddenly seem immobilized by pain, calling for the ref to intervene.

I’ve never been comfortable around groups of guys when it gets into the putting-down. My past being a kind of geek - it kind of turns into an attack on the weakest of the group.

Whatever you wear, you have to own it. Make it yours.

Why is a movie starring women considered a gimmick and a movie starring men is just a normal movie?

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.

You want a happy ending, but not such a ridiculous happy ending that it doesn't mean anything to anybody.

Man up and add a tux to your wardrobe. Just find one you like and get it well-tailored to your own measurements.

I just love Kate. [Bieber], to me, is one of the funniest impressions because it's so all encompassing. It's like a total body and soul impression. But that's Kate. Every character she does is that way.

One of the many things I want to do is dig us out of that hole so that guys, in particular, can go: "Oh, yeah. Those people are really funny. I've seen that person. It's a woman. They are funny."

Little Britain… ever since it first came on… I come here a lot, we have a lot of friends here, my wife used to work with a lot of Brits, so we were always keyed into the hot shows when they first came out. So, I fell in love with Little Britain.

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.

Internationally and in foreign markets, movies starring women don't make as much money as movies starring men. And then you can blame filmmakers, especially in comedy, which is my bread and butter, because it's become a bit of a boys' club over the years. With the boys in charge you get these takes on women which are either the girlfriend or the mean wife or the girl who appears in a romantic comedy. You're just getting either men's fantasies about women or what they think is the reality about women instead of men just having a healthy attitude about women.

I'm not looking for people to bow down to me or do things in my name or even pass around a collection plate for me. I say that I'd like to be God for a while because He really can get away with anything. I mean, ANYTHING.

Everybody who's making the movies needs to work hard to make sure they're good. And if you don't show up and see the movies and support them financially, no one is going to make them. It's going to change unless it makes money. That's the long and short of it. You have to give in to the fact that it's a business.

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.

What you never want to do is have a story that doesn't track emotionally, because then you're going joke to joke and you're going to fatigue the audience. The only thing that's going to string them to the next joke is how successful the previous joke is.

I have an inability to enjoy things, but that's why we're in comedy. If we were happy, we wouldn't be funny, I guess.

The biggest thing I’ve heard for the last four months is, ‘Thanks for ruining my childhood’.

I really put my heart and soul into everything and I don't want a project that doesn't feel real to me or I don't get invested in. In order to drive a show for eight or 10 years or whatever the target for doing a show is, it really has to be a part of you. Because then I can come up with stories for seasons and seasons on end. I wish I had the ability to just like the idea and get people in and drive it that way through their enthusiasm. For me, it has to be a little more of a personal thing, even if it's not a completely personal story.

Ever since I was a little kid, I've felt comfortable in a suit. It all started when my mom bought me a three-piece Pierre Cardin suit. I wore that thing everywhere. Eventually I realized I was going to be the kid who got beat up in school, but I kept wearing it.

I try not to blame the public, because the public - men, especially - have seen not great portrayals of women in supporting roles, because they're not given the lead roles a lot of the time. Especially in comedy, they're relegated to the adversary, which is like "the mean girlfriend."

I've always enjoyed people studying themselves in the mirror, and I also enjoy those 'walk and feel bad' shots. I like anything that isolates people and focuses them on themselves, or makes us focus on their faces as they're going through something.

I'm not a painter who's saying, "I want people to see my work when I die; it will be this and that." That's not satisfying to me.

I find that so many times when somebody tries to go back in, it sort of isn't as good and you wish they hadn't done it.

With a suit, even if you're having a nervous breakdown, you still look like you're in charge.

The director is the only person on the set who has seen the film. Your job as a director is to show up every day and know where everything will fit into the film.

The greatest movies are the ones you want to watch again and again.

I think things go wrong when there's not a very specific plan and specific emotional roadmap. You need to know what a scene needs to get across, and what story point that needs to be advanced, whether it's discovering someone for the first time or whether it's seeing a relationship get strained. 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.

Film, television, and working with a camera is such an intimate art form that if a camera is right on you, and I've got your face filling the screen, you have to be real. If you do anything that is fake, you're not going to get away with it, because the camera is right there, and the story is being told in a very real way.

I couldn't be happier to not be acting. I miss it, but I don't miss the auditioning or trying to get work.

If you're not connected emotionally to a story, then you're dead. You're as a filmmaker really just opening the door for people to lose interest and their minds to wander, for them to start picking it apart. That's what people will do, people will naturally tear stuff apart because they're trapped with it, they paid money for it. And they came into it wanting to love it. So all you can really do is piss off the audience. Unless you do things right.

Women comedy is different than men comedy. Guy comedy is very aggressive, it's about insulting each other, name-calling, and kind of busting each other's chops, and that's not what women's comedy is.

I was a standup comedian, which is kind of like writing and directing yourself.

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.

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.

The hard thing is getting people to come to the theater to see something, no matter if it's good or not.

I'm really a skeptic. I'm kind of not a believer in the paranormal.

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.

My style of comedy is very real and bittersweet, and sort of always on the verge of kind of being tragic.

The good thing is that I really think that American television is in kind of a second golden age. Even though there's a lot of reality and all those contest shows, which aren't my kind of shows, the scripted stuff that's going on is so good right now because of basic cable. Everyone has stepped it up and realised that people like quality.

Everyone takes pause at 40. It's the age you have to assess everything in your life. It's the fictitious marker that's always coming up when you're young. The world really does look at you to kind of have it together by 40, and be successful by 40. Whatever success means.

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.

I don't want to do anything to revisit Freaks and Geeks that isn't awesome.

The more suits I owned, the more I realized the best besuited look a man can achieve comes from a harmony of three details: fabric, construction, and fit. If the suit fits you like a glove and it's well made, you simply feel better about everything in life when you're wearing it.

I'm glad I took the leap away from acting into going behind the camera because it's much more satisfying - I love acting and I still do, but it's much more satisfying to be able to make the stuff.

At the end of the day if you want to entertain people, you've got to take your ego out of the equation.

Who knew there were so many ghosts to be busted in the world?

I hate that we're always called "the all-female Ghostbusters," because you wouldn't refer to the original as "the all-male Ghostbusters."

You need to have one element about your outfit that is imperfect, that says you live in it and you're not letting it control you. I think men and women both need a softness about them with formal wear.

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.

I don't like weddings. I never have. I find moments in them I really like, but I always look at them like, "Oh my God, we have to go to a wedding." My problem with weddings is that they are just too long.

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.

If you made a movie that no man in the world went near, but every woman in the world went to, you'd have the highest grossing movie of all time. You'd make trillions of dollars. But I don't want to make movies that are just for the ladies. I don't want to ghettoize any audience that way.

I really feed off of The Walking Dead.

I've never been to a class reunion or anything because I'm always afraid of that one - there's going to be some 'Carrie'-like incident.

Every director should take an acting class.

The British model, which I've always thought was great, is that you do a TV show and then they sell it. Then you can buy it at the video stores forever, so it never went away. But American TV used to be if you had a show and it got cancelled, then it never existed. It was just this thing you heard about and you couldn't see it again. There is something so great about shows getting released and people getting to watch them over and over again. It definitely takes the sting out of it.

I can't impress enough upon people that if you tell an honest story that people relate to and people believe and invest in, you can do anything.

A lot of comedies fall apart because they just go from joke to joke, and the characters are all sort of being crazy off on their own.

"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.

There's nothing worse than the sequel that's a letdown from the first movie.

Wearing a tuxedo isn't as simple as it sounds. I've been to a lot of award shows in Hollywood over the years and have seen some pretty sad tuxes. It's surprisingly easy to go off the rails.

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!

Hollywood is a business and movie studios are only going to do what's going to make money. It's not an altruistic thing. They are blatant grabs for money. Responsible studios want to make quality pictures, but at the same time nobody is going to make quality pictures they know aren't going to make any money.

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.

I've never had to get a job as a waiter or anything. I've always been able to support myself in 'the biz.' Which is great. It's really fantastic to be able to say that, because I know it's hard to do.

Where there seems to be a difference between guys being nuts and women being nuts is that guys are much more open in calling each other on stuff; lots of insults and dirty names. Whereas women will talk frankly and honesty, but there also seems to be more passive aggressiveness.

I'm just an enormous British comedy fan.

Katie Dippold, who I wrote the script with, she's very into ghosts and all that. So I go, "Hey, why don't you talk to Katie?"

What I don't like is when I see stuff that I know has had a lot of improv done or is playing around where there's no purpose to the scene other than to just be funny. What you don't want is funny scene, funny scene, funny scene, and now here's the epiphany scene and then the movie's over.

I love funny people, and when I'm with funny people, or people who are amusing in their weirdness, I love it. Because that to me is funny, as opposed to someone who stops and says, 'Hey let me tell you a joke.'

The reason most comedies don't win awards is that the filmmakers put the comedy first. This means you have to create a story around the jokes.

Scripts are a house of cards and you can't just reach in the middle and pull out the middle card because the house of cards will fall down. But at a certain point you almost have to allow that house of cards to get knocked down a few times because you need to make it sturdier. How many times do you hear, "No, that doesn't make sense," or "Why would this happen?" That was a mistake. You shouldn't have those moments, because the moment you're knocked out of the story, then you're dead. And all you can go is moment to moment,or joke to joke. And that's gonna wear people out.

I'm extremely, extremely lucky to be who I am and do what I do and work with the people I work with. Even though I can always find something to complain about, I find it very hard to complain.

I always felt, and still feel, one of my best strengths as a director is having been an actor for a long time. Nobody knows actors and their insecurities and strengths and everything more than somebody who's done it before.

My wife and I don't have kids and people are down on us about it. But we're just not wired that way, so don't tell me I have to.

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've made a career making stuff that nobody sees, so anything that I can do to help make something that people are going to enjoy and want to see over and over again, then I'm there.

I mean Ally McBeal was sort of the closest thing I can think of to kind of being a comedy-drama but that had its own kind of style that meant it got kind of big sometimes. But it was a great show.

I'm from Mt. Clemens, Michigan. It's right outside Detroit. The suburbs. I was always very heavily involved in theater back then. I was always in drama club or forensics. Anything that you could do that had some performing, I was doing it.

As a director, I really wanted to learn and I needed to get away from my own stuff to figure out how to just do things and work with good people.

I'm more of a science head, so I was like, how would a guy use - if there were ghosts - technology to bring them back?

I always feel in improv that nothing is ever as good once it's repeated.

Bad women's comedies are made by men who didn't consult enough women.

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.

You can never have a thousand percent batting average on jokes - it's just never going to happen.

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.

I was brought up in a very religious household and did a lot of praying throughout a big part of my life and always thought of God as being not only a powerful father figure and the ruler of all time and dimension but also as a friend with whom I could chat and ask questions to and get advice from.

'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.

I'm kind of a failure. I mean, I'll be honest. I'm successful in that I'm getting to work on great stuff, but I think I'm a failure in all the personal stuff that is most important to me.

At the end of the day the question comes, what are you doing for the world? You have to try to do something that's going to add something positive.

Any ensemble - they didn't call it "the all-male Expendables," for example. But it's Hollywood's fault that people say that, because there have been so few movies that have allowed women to have these leading roles, so that's Hollywood's fault.

When guys see a movie starring women, they go, "That must be filled with these characters I see in these movies who are such a drag." And that's just bad for everybody.

You just have to be classy at the end of the day. That doesn't mean you can't go with a midnight blue tux. And if you can find a deep red tux that looks classy and classic, I think you can pull it off.

In a perfect world, I'd love to make 90-minute movies, but for me, a movie needs to be as long or short as it can sustain itself.

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.

What you want is the thing that critics love and audiences love, but that's the hardest thing to do.

Forty is the line of demarcation that says you're an adult now. You're an adult, so don't pretend you're a kid anymore.

As tempting as it seems to wear tennis shoes with your tux, don't do it. I think it looks ridiculous. If you're 14 years old, maybe give it a shot. In general, don't portray anything that says 'I'm too cool and I don't care.

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.

Throughout my teens, I just wanted to go somewhere I could wear a Donald Duck pin and no one would care.

So many stars who have shows are intimidated by having people around them be funnier than them. It's always the unsuccessful ones. Look at Seinfeld - he's great because he let everyone be hilarious.

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.

People are like, "Why are you all dressed up? Did you dress up just for me?" I'm like "No, I dressed up because I'm an adult and I felt like putting on my suit." But I love it. Tom Ford and Ralph Lauren are my two heroes of clothing designers.

Whatever makes you laugh is fine, and all we can do as comedy professionals is try to steer you towards something that we think is a little better - but not put you down or just perplex you in the process.

I'm the biggest proponent of test screenings now. There's two ways to face test screenings. For dramas, I don't know if I would rely on them as much, although I still think you need them, because you're making a movie for an audience at the end of the day. But with comedy... You could go through a script or anything I ever worked on, where you go, "This is hilarious," and you put it in front of people and you get nothing. And then the other side of it, is something you're like, "I think this is really stupid," and it gets a giant laugh.

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.

I'm just always a bit thrown when, in the immediate aftermath of some event which makes us feel like either God's out to get us or He's not doing His job as well as He can, we all still get together and continue to ask Him for help.

One of the biggest things you have is your reputation and your reputation with knowing what's good and what's not good.

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.

The awards world can be ridiculous, but I'm not one to bash it. I love awards! When I've been nominated for Emmys and when I won my DGA Award, I couldn't have been happier. I always liked getting a gold star in class.

That's the thing with women's movies - there's so much about kind of catfighting. And my experience is women aren't - look, we all get in fights with people, but it's not that face-to-face aggression.

So many of my friends have always been women growing up... I always feel slightly more comfortable around women because with guys in general there's always more of a danger zone... it's very aggressive sometimes the way guys act with each other, putting each other down and calling each other names, so I was always too sensitive for that and used to hang out with the girls. And they were always really funny to me.

I always hated high-school shows and high-school movies, because they were always about the cool kids. It was always about dating and sex, and all the popular kids, and the good-looking kids. And the nerds were super-nerdy cartoons, with tape on their glasses. I never saw 'my people' portrayed accurately.

Period costume films are fun to discover, but they're not relatable. It's more, 'Wow, that's cool - did it really look like that back then?' Whereas with a comedy, you're like, 'Yeah, that's me, that's my friends.' No matter what, I want people to relate.

For years, it's driven me crazy that women don't have better roles, especially in comedies. I know so many funny women but I always felt... misogynist streak is too strong a term - but a dismissiveness.

We didn't used to be so precious about women in comedy back in the old days.

I'm a pretty feminized geek, you know? I have that point of view, I grew up around a lot of girls, so I'm pretty sensitive to that. But I don't dare say 'I know how women think.

What's great about the geek spirit is that life never seems to stop us, and they never seem to kill our enthusiasm, our optimism and our hunger to experience the world. We keep our sense of humor, we protect our dignity, we talk to our friends about the experience and then we start again fresh the very next day.