Harold Ramis
I really only worked for about a month on 'Meatballs.' What happened was that Ivan Reitman figured out that studios wanted to meet everybody involved with 'Animal House' except the producer. So he thought he'd better start directing.
Everybody has a Bill Murray story. He just punishes people for reasons they can't figure out.
There was a moment when we were casting 'Groundhog Day' when Bill Murray was not at the top of my list. He'd been getting crankier and crankier. By the end of 'Ghostbusters II', he was pretty cranky. I thought, 'Do I want to put up with this for twelve weeks?'
The simple idiot's advice I give to screenwriters who say they want to sell a screenplay is, 'Write good.'
As a director on 'The Office,' there's a tremendous weight that comes with directing features. I was being asked to direct a show that had already won an Emmy for Best Comedy. Steve Carell and the cast had already won the Screen Actor's Guild Awards.
I would remake 'Club Paradise.' I thought the story was cool, the setting was great. Everything lined up, except I wrote it for Bill Murray and John Cleese.
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.
My only conclusion about structure is that nothing works if you don't have interesting characters and a good story to tell.
I would happily have done any of the 'Bourne Identity' sequels. There are good sequels, but I'm not good at making them.
It seems that, culturally, young people function more in groups. They know each other through digital media. All the young comedy people who work in TV are really used to working at the table with lots of writers around. They're comfortable in the group; they don't assert their own egos over everyone else.
I had a dream cast when Dan first went off and wrote 'Ghostbusters 3' by himself. It was so long ago that my dream cast was Ben Stiller, Chris Farley, and Chris Rock. That would have been cool. Now, a lot of time has passed, and there are a lot of young funny people.
The movie 'Vacation' had a whole different ending. They never even got to the amusement park, Wallyworld, at the end of 'Vacation.' The last 20 minutes of the film was entirely different - and bombed so badly that the audience just stopped cold.
Never hit anyone in anger, unless you're absolutely sure you can get away with it.Collection: Stripes
Just expressing contempt for your leaders doesn't really accomplish anything.Collection: Leader
You can't love somebody into a state of mental health.Collection: Mental Health
Find the most talented person in the room and if it's not you, go stand next to him. Hang out with him. try to be helpful.Collection: Trying
Life has all of these contradictory feelings and contradictory results. People spend their whole lives struggling to get what they think they want, and even if they get it, they find that it's either not what they wanted, or it comes with so many unwanted consequences. We're always shut off from pure joy.Collection: Struggle
Well, for me, it's the relationship between comedy and life - that's the edge I live on, and maybe it's my protection against looking at the tragedy of it all. It's seeing life in balance. Comedy and tragedy co-exist. You can't have one without the other. I'm of the school that anything can be funny, if seen from a comedic point of view.Collection: School
Ive never been a big believer in ghosts or the spirit world, and for me, that was part of the point of the movie, ... What the Ghostbusters represented was the triumph of human courage and human ingenuity. People create their own monsters. Our fears come from within us, not outside.Collection: People
You don't have to know much, just a little bit more than everybody else.Collection: Littles
I look for the meaning in what's funny, and I look for what's funny about things that are meaningful to me.Collection: Meaningful
Most people live somewhere on the spectrum of anxiety and depression.Collection: People
If people work together, if they can keep a cooperative spirit and use their ingenuity and balance it all with good humor and good will, then there's nothing to be afraid of. That's the sappy part of it, ... On the other hand, every Halloween for many years when my kids were trick-or-treating I would put on my 'Ghostbusters' jumpsuit with a police flashlight to protect all the kids from ghosts.Collection: Halloween
Comedy is essentially made by young men, or older men with some form of arrested development, for young men or immature older men.Collection: Men
Whatever bliss we think we're going to find, we may find it in brief flashes, fleeting moments that come and go. There's an impossibility to nailing down any good feeling.Collection: Thinking
I was the little guy who knew how to tie a necktie. It came from having absentee parents. They were tremendously loving and caring people who, by circumstance, had to go to work.Collection: Caring
Stand-up is every man for himself; you learn from hanging out at these clubs and watching other guys, and then trying not to be like them.Collection: Men
Life doesn't care about your vision. You just gotta roll with it.Collection: Vision
If Chevy Chase had not been an actor, he might have been a very popular guy in advertising or whatever field he would have gone into, because of his charisma.Collection: Guy
I have no trouble selling out—I’m a benevolent hack, in a certain way—but I want to pander for something I believe in.Collection: Believe
Where's the great pay? Where's the travel? Where's the Winnebago, Goddamnit!Collection: Money
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.Collection: Thinking
Most comedy is not very ambitious. You probably can't name more than a handful of comedies that would qualify for Best Picture.Collection: Names
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.Collection: Fun
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.Collection: Laughter
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.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: 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.Collection: Nice
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.Collection: Moving
When I've written for Bill Murray - I've written six films for him - people would read it and say, "Oh, that's so perfectly Bill." He'd read it and say, "Are you kidding? I can't say these words." So it's all about perception.Collection: People
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.Collection: Impact
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.Collection: Nice
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.Collection: Block
Some people have a fear of rejecting all the security that comes with family, church and state. They become fundamentalists.Collection: People
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.Collection: Children
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.Collection: People
Parents tell us things to protect us, or they educate us from their own misinformation or misconceptions.Collection: Parent
The comic impulse is sometimes a reaction to sadness. You feel like you can make one choice or the other.Collection: Sadness
I try to measure the amount of truth in a work rather than just looking at the generic distinction between comedy and drama.Collection: Drama