Quotes

[on directing Robert Downey Jr. in The Judge (2014)] He loyally followed the material. When an actor becomes a movie-star, always in the spotlight like Robert, they tend to swing really hard and go for it, but he didn't do that. He had incredible control and I was profoundly impressed.

Laughter is really a gift. It's the most vulnerable state you can be in.

I believe comedy should be free to go anywhere. I believe that there is tasteful and untasteful, I think they're very close to each other, and it's how you handle it tonally. But I'm an equal opportunity offender. I'm happy to go at anything that has a cause to be laughed at.

Wedding Crashers (2005) is a very soft movie in the way that it's emotional. It's about friendship, love and relationships. I tend to go to the light. My frustration in life is that I've always been a lover of Paul McCartney. You want to be taken seriously as the artist and be John Lennon, and I've always been drawn to the Paul McCartney colors in life.

Laughter is binary: It either happens or it doesn't. As each joke arrives in the course of a film, the cavernous space of the theater is either filled with joy and laughter or with the quiet of cringing embarrassment. Every time you step to the plate to make a joke, you're going to experience one or the other.

People who do not have funny in them are not funny when they read funny lines. Sorry. Just doesn't work that way. Seriously, this is the biggest rule of all. You live and die with your casting decisions. Your actors are the heart and soul of the whole thing. Without brilliant actors, you will not have a brilliant film.

On the comedy side of what I love as a filmmaker are Richard Pryor, Lenny Bruce, and Eddie Murphy; those are my favorites.

I generally don't walk out of films. If I start a book, and I don't love it by page 100, I will stop reading because it's just too much of a time commitment. But you never know with a movie what's going to turn around.

I watch comedy on TV, and it's too cutty for me. I get a little jarred, and it succeeds. It's not like it's not working, and I look at certain things, and it has the cutting... it's not like I'd make terribly different cuts, but for some reason, it moves too fast for me.

Comedy, when it works, is light on its feet and has the illusion of complete spontaneity: as if there is no film, no camera. You are standing there experiencing it all in real time. This illusion, I believe, is why so many people think comedy is easy.

Art is the only thing that can save me from my opinions about the world. I tend to get very worked up about what I see going on, and I feel, you know, impotent to make the kind of changes and the kind of difference that I would like to make.

I do believe in God. I don't believe in God as a person, but I believe in God as a state of energy and consciousness that we all share.

I honestly never thought in my career I was going to do a body-switching movie.

I'm very comfortable with an R-rating. I feel like it sounds like what people talk like in real life; I think it's more real to me.

I believe comedy should be free to go anywhere. I believe that there is tasteful and untasteful, I think they're very close to each other, and it's how you handle it tonally. But I'm an equal opportunity offender.

I'm not funny. Never have been and, as far as I can tell, I never will be.