Kian Lawley Quotes

In my stand-up, I generally improvise from an outline.

Stand-up is my foundation. That's where it started at. And I love it because it's personal. It's mine. It's all me. It's my experience in life.

When I was at youth theatre and drama school, I never thought people would mistake me for a stand-up.

Stand-up is the only thing in which you actually write it, act it and direct it simultaneously, so it's actually a great theater exercise.

My stand-up is quite good now, people say. It's just like a big conversation each time. Every gig is a rehearsal.

I loved being behind the scenes and finding out how they make movies.

For a director, the most challenging scenes are the dialogue scenes.

I like working in both movies and television. Television is faster, not very much rehearsal and a lot of material is shot in a day. Big budget movies are luxurious in terms of the schedule. Independent films often shoot fast as well.

I am always so happy to be at 'SNL.' I still feel like a kid when I'm there, like I can't believe I'm watching them make the show.

When you're a TV star, you pretty much set the tone, and on 'Police Woman,' we goofed around all the time.

My first love is doing my own comedy stuff.

Here's the thing about standup directing: not that hard. As I said on Twitter one day, or maybe it was Instagram - sorry, I want to keep my platforms straight - it's essentially the same five shots over and over again. Seven if you're ambitious.

Usually in a Smosh sketch, we get 60 shots, 12 hours to shoot - we're just going 'bam, bam, bam.'

The reality about shooting films is that you can shoot many jokes and decide later which one works. So it's not worth fighting about jokes.

Stand-up is cool. In stand-up, you get to learn about yourself if you do it from a thoughtful place.

An actor's performance can be improved or shaped - or ruined - by what takes you use, how long you are on the actor's face, what line you put on the other actor's face, and when do you use close-ups or wide shots or two shots.

When we had Brian Cox in 'Super Troopers,' we learned that when you put a great actor in the center of our lunacy, it grounds everything.

I don't write anything. It's all done onstage, which is why I always tell younger comics that they just have to go do it. You have to get up, talk, and take a thought or a word and just expound, and you find it in there. I don't sit down and write.

I was always goofing around. I suppose having a father who was an actor made you think that it was a real possibility as a career.

By 1949 I knew all the studio tricks.

When a movie is made, you toy with many ideas, and a prequel to 'Dabangg' is one of them.

I thought that I was going to be a stand-up comedian or an actress. Turns out, I can't act my way out of a paper bag and stand-up comedy is a lot harder than it appears.

Dominic Sherwood would always tell me a joke right before it was my take or my close up. He'd say a funny joke, and I couldn't stop laughing, even after they said, 'Action.'

Three years at the institute had not taught me as much as two weeks on the sets of 'Susman.'

As a filmmaker, every tool you get to tell the scene better is important.