Integrity matters. What our fans think matters.
Many films you see in theaters are financed through outside sources. With big films, the studio will pay, hoping to reap the reward of their big bet. But with medium and small-sized films, outside production companies and financiers often foot the bill.
A lot of comedies in the 1980s and 1990s had all these colors and were so brightly lit. But John Landis had this dark style, like a Scorsese film.
The first thing I do in the editing room is the 'radio edit,' where you listen to the dialogue and don't even look at the visuals. The rhythm, the music of the comedy, has to work.
If you're not doing something or saying something in comedy, the camera is going to go somewhere else.
Look at the opening sequence of 'The Blues Brothers,' which starts at the prison. The way it was filmed, it does not look like a comedy. I thought that was great.
The smartest thing a filmmaker can do is to become a good editor.
Filmmaking, at the end of the day, is really - in addition to the story and all of the equipment and the actors, it's really about time management. And so the smartest filmmakers are the ones who sort of pre-visualize the film in their head and are literally shooting the shots they need to cut the story together.
Violence is totally accepted in this country.
Every time you jump to another format in the 'picture business,' meaning film, television, commercials, the people in the other format go, 'Ah, yeah, you made a lot of features, but you don't know how to do TV' or the commercial people go, 'Oh, you can't do 30 seconds.'
When Broken Lizard writes a movie, we reject everything that doesn't have five guys as leads, so it needs to be cops or a basketball team; that's what we can do.
I was pre-med for a semester, and then I got a C- in organic chemistry and was washed out of that program. Then I imagined I'd be a lawyer. I was gonna go to law school.
'48 Hrs.' is very tough and funny.
'Smokey and the Bandit' is tough and funny.
I started standup at age nineteen. I decided that the only way I was going to try show business as a career was if I could make total strangers laugh.
I did a lot of standup from ages 19 to 24 but then stopped to focus on sketch with Broken Lizard.
Like hitting a baseball, comedy is very much about timing. To some degree, you either 'got it or you don't.'
Whether I'm performing or directing, I'm aways thinking about rhythm; sometimes it's nailing the right rhythm, and sometimes it's intentionally breaking the rhythm. Those two things are what make something funny or not. How long a shot is and where you put the camera are all part of that rhythm of directing.
Growing up, I was the only Indian kid around for miles, so I ached to belong. I had a neighborhood pack of nine guys and two girls, and we hung out all the time. We played football, baseball, and broom-hockey on the iced-up lake.
Our fans often tell us that they see themselves in us. The relationship between the guys in Broken Lizard rings a bell with them, because they have their own little friend groups, with their own complex dynamics, and their own private jokes.
