Adam McKay
I have no political ax to grind; I just find it absurd that huge billion-dollar corporations can take over elections. I just find it insane that, for instance, we give tax breaks to people like myself making millions of dollars, while there're no tax breaks for working people. That, to me, is not a political issue, that's a life issue.
Anyone in the comedy world knows that Horatio Sanz and Chris Parnell are two of the funniest guys around.
There's nothing more fun to me than new characters and a new world.
I don't want to speak for my movies; you could say my movies are just completely silly and dumb, but in the case of 'Idiocracy' and 'Borat,' without a doubt there is a really subversive and sophisticated assault on American culture.
It's one thing to break stuff and damage people's possessions, but when you start aiming at the ideology of America, that's dangerous comedy.
The living nightmare for a red state NASCAR driver would be a gay French driver.
If you're making comedies, they have to have a fun and a rhythm to them.
Michael Lewis has the amazing ability to take complex formulas and concepts and turn them into page-turners.
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.
It should be a law for one whole year that all laugh tracks are Seth Rogen. The world would get ever so slightly better.
'Step Brothers 2' would have been fun, there's no doubt about it. Maybe someday. Does that idea age? I don't know. It all depends on how the movie ages.
Nothing heightens chaos more than a berserk wild animal right in the middle.
It's just funny that Americans have to contend with 2000 channels, and 60 different specific news sources, and the confusion that it creates, and the junk that we get to see is hilarious.
I was a huge fan of comedy in high school.
I actually opened for Chris Rock at the Funny Bone one time.
The hardest thing in the world to do is to have someone in a seat in a theater laughing so hard that they're making weird sounds.
I hired a personal trainer to help me lose 25 pounds and get from obese to fat. My next step will be to get from fat to chubby.
Other than Green Day, we haven't had a lot of protest music over the past few decades.
It's time Hawaii answer doubters and produce documents proving that it is a state. What are they hiding? And why haven't we seen these documents?
My first joke was about a company called Five Star Parking that was all over Philadelphia: 'Who's reviewing parking lots?'
The thing is, I've gotten massages to Enya. I like Enya. If you ate fantastic steaks to Celine Dion, you'd like Celine Dion.
Having two kids, I don't get out to see stand up much anymore.
Matt Braunger really makes me laugh; I like that guy a lot.
As far as how much you listen to the audience, you listen to them when they really hate something.
If you do a Western that's funny, there's no way people don't call it a spoof or a parody, even though it may not be.
If you go back and watch 'The French Connection,' it's been cannibalized so many times. There are certain movies like that, where you see the original and think, 'This isn't so great.' And the reason it isn't so great is because everyone has copied it.
The way you really stop Al-Qaeda is by stopping their funding. It's not by carpet-bombing or land invasions or anything.
That's always the trick with the sequels, is how much do you repeat from the first one. Because we all get bummed out when you go see a sequel and it's beat for beat.
Tom Brokaw was never young.
I guess HBO did a giant 'War in the Pacific' mini-series that cost, like, a fortune, and there was a little moment where they literally had no money. And even though the show had become kind of a cult hit, there was an issue of whether they could actually afford to do it.
All you can really do as director is sort of set a tone.
There's nothing the people love more than a Federal Reserve joke.
You have a guy like Bernie Madoff literally steal $80 billion, you know, AIG steal hundreds of billions, Goldman Sachs. Crime has changed so much, and to really do a movie with, like, drug dealers or drug smugglers is kind of almost quaint at this point.
Ultimately, the only people who are in any way edified by hanging with famous people are you at the age of 11 and your mom.
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.
I love action movies.
Actually, 'Wayne's World 2' I kind of liked. I think 'Wayne's World 2' does have some creative things in it, some ideas in it.
Basically, we used to have a rule at 'Saturday Night Live' that you're not allowed to bring up 'The Simpsons' at the rewrite table, because 'The Simpsons' has done every joke there is. Every week there would be guys going, 'The Simpsons did that.' I go, 'C'mon.' And 'South Park,' too.
A dry stretch of commentary in the middle of an 'Anchorman' movie would have been a terrible thing.
Sometimes I know a joke I'm going to yell out ahead of time, but most of the time it's stream of conscious. You never really know it until you've got everyone dressed up, the set is built, all the extras are here.
If you look at 'Avatar,' could you imagine if you did 'Avatar' for 50 million dollars? It would be ridiculous! You would almost be getting laughs from the audience, unless you got a real indie director to do something incredibly stylised.
White-collar crime has been marketed - billions of dollars have been put in to have us be bored by it.
The easiest time to be funny is during a fairly serious situation. That way you can break the ice.Collection: Ice
We're always looking for the backbone, the central idea, and once you have that you know everything can circle around it.Collection: Circles
Old man with an old phone. That's never not funny.Collection: Men
The one thing for sure is, I don't ever want to waste a movie. I don't ever want to waste effort.Collection: Effort
Most of what's tricky about comedy is the perception of it and the audience's expectation.Collection: Expectations
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.Collection: Rolling
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.Collection: Couple