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.
— Paul Feig
One of the biggest things you have is your reputation and your reputation with knowing what's good and what's not good.
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.
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'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 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.
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'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.
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.
Every director should take an acting class.
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.
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.
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.'
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.
In my years of acting, the one thing I was never able to do convincingly was to laugh on camera. Fake-laugh.
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.
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.
My style of comedy is very real and bittersweet, and sort of always on the verge of kind of being tragic.
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.
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.
The hard thing is getting people to come to the theater to see something, no matter if it's good or not.
What you want is the thing that critics love and audiences love, but that's the hardest thing to do.
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.
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 always feel in improv that nothing is ever as good once it's repeated.
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.
Throughout my teens, I just wanted to go somewhere I could wear a Donald Duck pin and no one would care.
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.
