Mark Rydell Quotes

Expert: a man who makes three correct guesses consecutively.

Hosting the Oscars is much like making love to a woman. It's something I only get to do when Billy Crystal is out of town.

I think my speeches are hilarious. I think I'm a natural comedian, but I like denying people the chance to laugh. I want to deny you the relief of the punchline.

The satirist shoots to kill while the humorist brings his prey back alive and eventually releases him again for another chance.

As long as it's funny, there's no such thing as too far.

People who know me know I have a sense of humor that can really push the envelope.

My agent tells me I am drawing the largest salary ever paid in the halls of England. Wonderful, isn't it? for a quiet, rural gardener like myself.

There's a good chance that in 40 years, after the floods, people zipping by on scavenged jetpacks with their scavenged baseball caps on backwards, I will be in my rocking chair saying bitterly, 'I remember when 'all right' was two words.'

Stand-up comedy and comedy in general is the ultimate form of free speech, because you get to poke holes in all the pretentious bubbles politicians and pundits and popes and pretenders try to float over our heads.

I'm glad that my films have been consistently faring well rather than one stray Friday!

Plenty of bad movies are very successful, and plenty of good movies are not. And distribution is so crazy, some films won't even get their day in court.

Rhetoric does not get you anywhere, because Hitler and Mussolini are just as good at rhetoric. But if you can bring these people down with comedy, they stand no chance.

I don't get a chance to be funny with the thrillers. I like to be funny, and I think I am really funny. So with 'Middle School: The Worst Years of My Life', it was fun to let loose.

If my books had been any worse, I should not have been invited to Hollywood, and if they had been any better, I should not have come.

Ideally, I'd like to have a movie that people like and makes money.

I think that what comes through in Chicago humor is the affection. Even though you're poking fun at someone or something, there's still an affection for it.

And as a filmmaker, I'm trying to unhook myself from this idea that unless you have a brilliant, long, enormously lucrative theatrical run, that your movie somehow failed. And I don't believe that.

Hollywood is a roulette wheel. Each project dictates what's going to happen for you next, and it doesn't really matter that your project is critically acclaimed or won awards or has fans worldwide. It's a matter of how many movie tickets and DVDs and on-demand movies that you sell.

Last year, when 'Black Swan,' 'True Grit' and 'King's Speech' all grossed over $100 million, it gave studios and independent financiers the confidence to make daring movies and not do the same old you-know-what.

I guess there's a certain amount of poking fun at certain characters, but that's because there is something amusing about them or about the way they behave, so I guess you can say that that's poking fun at the character. But the character is your own invention, so who cares?

There was a lot about the military that I thought was pretty silly, but these cartoons weren't meant to take a poke at anybody or anything. They were meant to make people laugh.

I certainly wouldn't mind if 'Jurassic Park' turns out to be commercially successful, and somebody says, 'Hey, you were in a box-office hit, and if you want to do another movie, we'll give you five million dollars to make it.'

I think everyone is born with humor, but your life can beat it out of you, sadly, or you can be lucky enough to grow up in it.

If a film becomes successful, the actor is blamed for being commercial and not having a true love for movies. When we do serious films, we will be blamed for not planning our career properly. I believe that what one should do is to make good cinema and try to make it successful.

Whenever we actors become part of a Bollywood film, there is a certain pressure of earning a box office success.