Judd Apatow Quotes

I actually love Scorsese comedies. He's an underrated comedy director. I think his comedies are some of the best comedies ever made.

I love 'Goodfellas' because it's a great movie - it's funny and there is action at perfect points. I just think Martin Scorsese makes everyone look really cool.

A lot of our favorite comedies in general are usually directed by writers, whether or not they wrote the original script themselves.

Actually the hardest films to make are comedies. In normal life, funny things happen by accident; to re-create those by design in a film takes real technique.

David Zucker was great! Those guys are funny. I mean, they are funny. There's a wonderful thing about doing that kind of work like Superhero Movie: You have to be real, but you also have to get the laugh. There you are, your director and the producers are right there at the monitors, and you either get the laugh or you don't. And so you just do it until you get the laugh.

I think when I was getting into directing, or wanting to be a director, when I was a teenager, the two films that really inspired me were Raising Arizona and Evil Dead II. And in the case of the former, I thought, "Wow. Why don't all comedies look like this?" And then as I started doing comedy, particularly when I started doing it on TV...

The most important thing is to be true to yourself, however you feel, and not try to feel or behave differently because you think you should, or someone has told you how you must feel. But do think about it. Unexamined feelings lead to all kinds of trouble.

I don't think there's that many great 90-minute comedies.

I think of great masters, like [Alfred] Hitchcock, for example, who works absolutely within this sensational realm. You feel like you can always tell what temperature a room is in a Hitchcock film because the people feel alive, they don't feel like they're just being filmed on a stage.

I think a shot can actually influence a scene in a huge way. For example, comedy is always better in a two-shot. What's between the characters is what's funny. So you learn about these things as you go along.

The timing of comedy is so difficult. You've got to leave room for a laugh, you don't want to kill the laugh, but on film, you can't just suddenly stop for a laugh and then carry on. So, I think it's a real art form, comedy on film.

Obviously, my stuff has been more in the comedy realm, and I really believe that if I'm laughing behind the camera, then I think the film will be funnier.

There's something therapeutic about connecting with an audience - when there's something really sort of odd or silly that you think is funny, and conveying it to an audience.

I think people are people and if their feelings are real and truthful, they can connect.

Judd Apatow, Conan O'Brien ... taking what you think is funny, and then adding another layer to it. That's kind of my sensibility. Those are the guys that make me laugh.

I don't think there's anything Craig Ferguson could say that would make me laugh. Ad-libbing is not the same as entertainment.

I like to think in camera, but at the last minute the most important thing is that there is something happening between the actors. But good actors can have a lot of scenes going around them but sometimes it sort of helps the performance because it takes their mind off of who they are supposed to be.

Personally, I didn't think there was anything wrong with sadness. Just the opposite – hypocrisy made people happy and truth made them sad.

I think it's always the emotional situations that are more tricky to nail and get into because I don't want to pretend.

Now if I cry on screen I think it's mint. Because I think that's how that person would feel at that time. And if it doesn't, then it just doesn't happen.

You have to think before speaking. That's a quality I'm continuously evolving. For some reason, it seems like I'm bumping my head into the wall a little bit too many times.

We're living in a time where movies are very unimportant. They're not leaving a footprint on your heart. We're going to the movies now and we're going, "Oh, man, that was cool! That was thrilling! That was a ride!" But, we're not walking away anymore thinking, "I just experienced something that could change the way I live."

There's very few directors I think in this industry that would pitch to a studio that they wanted to do a multi-layered almost at times existential high action, high drama surreal film that's sort of locked in his mind. And then have an opportunity to do that.

You easily close yourself off to certain things because you want to seem like you know it all, or you're not weak - emotion is often confused as weakness - so when emotions are undeniably physically affecting you, I think it's a gift.

It's just weird because like when I was writing Cry Baby I like...the only thing that I was thinking about, when writing it, was the concepts and the visuals, and the way that it sounded kind of happened naturally.