Nicholas Stoller
I think the best romantic comedies don't have villains.Collection: Romantic
I knew after 'Sarah Marshall' that my favorite genre is romantic comedy. Nothing is more satisfying than a great romantic comedy.Collection: Romantic
If you're engaged more than a year, there's something up. There's lot of debate as to whether one should or shouldn't get married, but when you get engaged, it's a promise to get married, and if you don't just do it within a year, one of the parties is using the excuse of, like, 'I can't find the right venue' to put off the wedding.Collection: Wedding
I was born in England - though both of my parents are American - and there's something about the 'Muppets' where they have this combination of English and American humor.Collection: Humor
I mean, come on: At the end of the day, we're all bisexual. A hundred years from now, there's not gonna be gay or straight. There's gonna be everything.
A big part of being in a relationship or marriage or whatever is you have to eventually compromise. Your life doesn't end up exactly the way you think it's going to, and if it's the right relationship, you might have to compromise what you're doing professionally.
As a comedy writer, I'm always praying for the day I can tell a self-aware/break-the-fourth-wall style of joke.
When the photographer is nearby, I like to say, 'Quick, get a photo of me looking into the camera,' because I'm never looking into the camera. Christopher Nolan looks into the camera, but I think most directors don't, so whenever you see a picture of a director looking at the camera, it's fake.
The movies I've made, I'm really proud of them. But the experience I've had is, people say to me, 'Oh my God, I saw your movie on HBO. It was actually funny.' Like, that's always the experience. It's a backhanded compliment.
There are so few good comedy sequels. The only one in recent memory that's good is '22 Jump Street.' It's a hard genre.
Each of the 'Toy Story's are telling an emotional story, but they're comedic. They're so successful creatively in terms of the stories they're telling. And they're pretty grounded.
I've thrown way more movie parties than real parties. My real life is so much more boring.
Your characters can do the worst things on Earth - cut to a happy baby, it ends up being OK.
It's really weird casting babies; it's kind of the dark underbelly of Hollywood, to meet babies and judge them.
I would never make a purely autobiographical movie, because it would be incredibly boring. But I always bring something. It's usually some emotional truth I've experienced, like in 'Get Him to the Greek,' the relationship between Jonah Hill and Elisabeth Moss, I had certainly had that kind of relationship with a girlfriend.
I watched all kinds of dirty movies as a kid. My parents were very liberal about that, and I was still an uber-nerd who never drank or did drugs. I don't think it matters.
I just watched 'Lethal Weapon' for the first time, and it's awesome... and so violent! Mel is out of his mind in that movie. Although now we know he's just insane - he was very much in his mind.
I'm not into sports, and politics is kind of my sport. I love talking about it and debating it and getting into it. I also think people on both sides of the aisle have real exaggerated, incorrect views of the other side, and that is fascinating to me.
I am personally quite liberal.
My family is really into politics.
I'm pretty old-fashioned. I feel most people - and this is purely from observation; I'm not an expert - but I think most people want to get married, whatever one might say about the institution of marriage, especially if you are in a long relationship.
A good romantic comedy is my favorite movie to watch.
I think the best romantic comedies are hard funny - no soft jokes, but ones that make you, like, guffaw. I also think that they have to make you feel good, ideally, and make you feel warm inside at the end.
The two times I had nervous breakdowns in my life were when I graduated from college and had my first kid.
There are still movies where females are just there to be cool, or they are there to lambaste their husbands and scold. But female comedy characters are changing for the better.
Comedy is my favorite genre. I think it often doesn't get the respect it deserves, and I think one of the reasons is there was a tradition in the past of comedy looking kind of brightly lit and like a sitcom.
I love watching how people who are in love with each other deal with each other. Every time I've had a fight with an ex-girlfriend, at the time they're horrible, but when I look back they're often funny and weird, and that kind of stuff makes me laugh.
The more real it is, the funnier it is. The more awkward it is, the more people are stumbly, the funnier it is. I like a sharp joke, but it has to say something that someone would actually say.
The huge advantage of boarding school is that it throws you into the social fire. Every social interaction I've had since then has been a million times easier. Literally, ever since then, it's all been child's play.
The frustrations and joys of parenthood are just hard to understand until you have a kid... the constant fight you're having with yourself, like loving being with your kid but also being kind of bored and wanting to look at your iPhone - it's kind of an interesting thing that's hard to write about before you've experienced it.
You just never know with movies how they'll be seen in a few years. You have no idea. Like, movies that were super popular when they came out have been forgotten. And other movies - and I put 'Sarah Marshall' in this - kind of weirdly stand the test of time a little bit.
R-rated comedies make as much money as PG-13. And I think the audiences wanna be shocked. Especially with comedy.
Basically, I always thought that if I had a movie that did well enough and warranted having a sequel, I would seriously entertain it because that's a huge blessing when that happens in your career.
As a moviegoer, I'm always annoyed when a big joke is ruined in the trailer, but generally, it actually makes it play better.
I've always had as many friends who are women as friends who are guys.
All of the things I've directed, I'm really emotionally close to. That's why I choose to direct them and spend years on them.
All movies are inherently collaborative, and animation even more so. There are hundreds and hundreds of people involved with an animated movie.
The worst thing you can do is animate something and then throw it out because it doesn't work story-wise.
But having said that, regardless to what reviews come out whatever, I like love the movie. I think it's great, and so people can think what they think about it, but I'm very happy with what we did. I'm really proud of whatever all the actors what we all kind of accomplished and so regardless of how well it does or whatever I'm very excited about it and I think we set out to do the thing and accomplished what we wanted to do. Our goal was met, so yeah.Collection: Thinking
And also, I'm most comfortable with like two people just sitting and talking about their feeling, you know, in a room with like two cameras and that's it. And I wanted to do something where there was like action and running and you know crowd scenes and big set pieces and certainly did a lot of that, so yeah.Collection: Running
The Lampoon was definitely quite formative. You know there's a crazy like kind of network of comedy writers from The Lampoon that are, that kind of you know like Seinfeld and The Simpsons and a lot of shows kind of had a lot of kind of Lampoon writers and so that was very formative. I mean, to me I got interested in comedy writing at an early like reading like Dave Barry.Collection: Crazy
I remember reading Dave Barry for the first time and being like oh my God I can't believe you can do this. Watching Mel Brooks and Monty Python and SNL and all that stuff really informed me as a writer and then at high school I started a satire magazine and the college like The Lampoon really introduced me to like you know a lot of very like-minded people who really wanted to like comedy was the center of their lives.Collection: Believe
And writing comedy and it really taught me how to kind of like craft jokes, it sounds like weird but really focus on crafting jokes and trying to make the writing really sharp. At the same time I did improv comedy in college, and that helped with understanding the performance aspect of comedy, you know, because it's different when you improv something vs. when you write it and they're both kind of part of my process now.Collection: Writing
And then afterwards I worked in advertising for a year which taught me about writing even when you don't want to (laughter) because there's never a moment that you want to write about an Erickson cell phone but you have to. And that's really important you know obviously for the...like if you really want to write, you have to write every day no matter how you feel or you know. And then, yeah, and then I ended up working in TV and then from TV into movies and then directing, so.Collection: Laughter
Every day is still exciting. I have like a very good system worked out with my editor. Some directors are in there every day, sitting there in the room with the editor. I lose perspective incredibly quickly, and so what I do is I watch...I come in the room and give very specific notes and then I go back to my house or in my office and I watch the dailies.Collection: Editors
And I watch all the dailies and I grade the jokes or the moments, you know, on a scale from... so I know exactly what we have. And so I can then go into the editing room and be like "I want you to do this moment, this moment, this joke, that joke. I'd like to see 3 versions."Collection: Editing
And then my editor really likes that because he's left alone to do what...to create those things instead of me breathing over his shoulder and I like it because I don't have to sit in the editing room all day. I get to watch just dailies.Collection: Editing
I mean we certainly always shoot a lot of extra material, but our goal was to make kind of like a big kind of rock-and-roll road trip comedy that has heart and that has hopefully you feel bad for Russell and you feel bad for Aldeus and also I wanted to surprise people with some of the turns in the movie and I think when I watched it with audiences they certainly...the reactions made me think that we did and so all that I'm just very excited about it.Collection: Mean
I love the romantic comedy genre. It's a genre rich with many of the best movies ever made and I try to treat it with the respect that Shakespeare treated it with.Collection: Trying
I think people try to jam a lot of artificial plot devices into a lot of romantic comedies, and they don't treat it with the respect I believe it deserves.Collection: Believe