Judd Apatow Quotes

I always have a ping-pong table in the studio. If you're with an artist and you notice the situation is going south a little bit, it's like, 'You wanna play ping-pong or foosball?' Or, 'You wanna go grab somethin' to eat?' And then you just like talk to them and relax them and get them comfortable and get yourself comfortable.

Filmmaking is all about people management.

Producing is always really hard, and you can never tell who's going to be easy to get along with and who's going to be difficult.

Working with different people anyway is like life and meeting different people... as long as you can be empathetic, you can take a bit of them on and see what you can do to help their process. That said, my relationship with Woody Allen was trying to hang on his every word so that I could tell everybody what he said afterwards. But certainly, he was a very good example of somebody who you didn't hear talk above a very low volume for the entire time he was on-set.

You're collaborating with people you don't even know, when you're making a film. You're collaborating with people you've never seen. So, the collaborative process is very, very different than when you're collaborating on a record with the musicians you've worked with all your life.

You can work well with people that you may not get on well with in life because it's a parallel realism.

Our success depends very largely upon how well we negotiate our way through our daily contacts with other people without friction or opposition.

The secret of directing is working with really good people.

Working with people is what I like to do. I don't feel intimidated. I always go in prepared. When you're not prepared, that's when you feel uncomfortable.

I've never written anything that wasn't somewhat of a collaboration. I don't know how people do it on their own.

You're not just writing in a vacuum, and then handing it over to someone else to shoot. You're writing, and then getting feedback from the actor and hearing their voice and how they play things.

A big part of making an album is that you want to have enough material - you want to have enough stuff for people to hear and know that it represents you. So it does sometimes turn into a situation where you're saying to the person you're working with, "Well, what do you want?" But then there are other times when I work with people and they'll turn to me and say, "How do you want to do this?" And that's actually when I work best.

It's easier to be creative if you've got other people to play with.

It's impossible having five, six, seven people in a room being creative together and not fight, because you want to fight. It's the only way creativity works, if you all put your ideas in.

Animation, by necessity, is a team sport, and the fewer people with input into my work, the better I like it.

My personality does well with people who are deemed difficult. I don't know why it does but I just seem to get along with them. The more difficult the better.

I write my own lyrics completely on my own. Sometimes I have people helping me with concepts or like choruses and stuff sometimes, but mostly I write all my own songs by myself, especially the verses and a lot of the choruses.

Once you play with these scenes and you're outlining it, again and again, and telling each other the narrative, and telling it to people you know, trying to make sure that the mathematics of the story work, you feel that those are in place, and the actual writing and final draft doesn't take as long.

No one person can take credit for the success of a motion picture. It's strictly a team effort. From the time the story is written to the time the final release print comes off the printer, hundreds of people are involved - each one doing a job - each job contributing to the final product.

As a young lawyer, I learned to try to find common ground with people, to look for a human connection. When I got to the Senate, despite the fact that there were a lot of people who didn't want me to get there - and were sure they'd never even talk to me, let alone work with me - I really tried to do the job I was sent there to do by the people of New York, which was to get things done for my constituents. I worked with Republicans, and we found a lot of common ground. It isn't easy, but it's part of what we have to do in politics today.

A film is not done by one person. It's done by a lot of people. I love this whole collaborative aspect. When it works well, you end up with something better than any of us started out to do.

Film is a collection of many mediums and collaboration and you're only as strong as the people you're working with - and everybody owns their mediums.

I think if I was ever really going to be more serious about writing I'd have to try and find some way to do it with other people. I do find the silence kind of eerie.

Of course, Sam [Fuller] was like, "No problem," because he treated it like a newspaper deadline. We worked long hours, often very late into the night, in his garage, which had been converted into an office. It was freezing cold outside and there was no heat in the garage, so he had a little space heater over by his side and I had a blanket that he graciously gave me to drape around my shoulders like a Navajo Indian. And he gave me cigars, too, of course.

Haji Ali taught me to share three cups of tea, to slow down and make building relationships as important as building projects. He taught me that I had more to learn from the people I work with than I could ever hope to teach them.