W. C. Fields Quotes

The only things Mick and I disagree about is the band, the music and what we do.

A lot of directors, they're creative, but they're different.

Growing up, there were TV shows that were very funny but very traditional. Classic things like 'Fawlty Towers,' obviously, and 'Blackadder' were pretty traditionally shot. And then there were the ones that start to break the mold or be really ambitious. The ones that spring particularly to mind would be 'The Young Ones.'

How to do half-hour comedy innovatively is something I do pride myself on. We invented it with 'I Love Lucy.'

I like to inject a bit of production value and flair to comedy, or at least to my little corner of comedy.

Sometimes, things need to be so understated on film that I don't even see them as funny, which isn't my favorite style, comedically. When I watch film comedy, I like people that are a little bit more alive on the screen and wound up. I like volatility and unpredictability and other long words like those.

I have worked with a lot of great directors but my favorites are all entirely different from one another. They don't go about it the same way.

You know I want to be a director, but you could never truly see the movies in my head and that, Ed, is why we broke up.

The difference between being an actor and a director is simple. The director has to hide his panic; the actor doesn't.

I've been doing It's Aways Sunny for 12 years, and so I have this cable sensibility. When I read the Grinder script, I was like "this is edgy," which is great, but in a different way from Arrested Development. I feel like the characters are a little more relatable, so maybe that's the difference.

Every director is different. One of the great things about getting to work with so many directors in one TV series is collaborating with different artistic visions and voices. And they all have something to offer and making the story better and bringing their vision to what you see in the frame.

I think there's a difference between making comedy and reporting comedy. When you're a joke teller you can easily fall into the second, you can show up and just say the jokes.

Well, there's a great Marlon Brando quote that to do something well you have to spiritually marry your director. You have to be making the same movie they are in that you have to try to help their imagination be better, and more full, and more fully realized, but you can't have a different imagination because then you end up - and you see this a lot in movies - where it feels like they were making five different films.

Any film that you see is never just the director. If it's a film that you love, it's not so easy to say, "Oh it's directed by this person - that means everything that person directs is going be wonderful."

Todd [Phillips] doesn't care. That's part of his genius as a director, he will say anything to anybody.

I like to adapt to a director's way of working. I love doing that. Each director is so different, and you have to adapt to this new way of doing something. That's what's amazing to me. That's why I love directors. I don't want to director to have to work around me. I think it's more fun for me to come in on their thing.

That's the greatest sin a director can commit; to make a film simply because he wants to make a film.

Acting doesn't exist in a vacuum. You need the director to have a set of eyes.

When people come in to act on the show, we say, "Just be extremely dry and not funny. Let the idea be the joke." That holds true through a lot of our stuff.

I started doing comedy just as myself, because I thought, "This is what's expected, you're meant to tell stories and do observations." And then I started to realize that I wanted to mix it up a bit, so I started to doing songs, and I had a little keyboard onstage and would bring in little props. Then I thought about the idea of talking about a character and becoming the character onstage. So, it sort of morphed into being stand-up that was more character based, and I found that's the stuff I got the better reaction from and was more exciting for me.

The thing I love about working with first-time directors is that it's always quite shocking how little difference there is between them and directors who've been directing all their lives.

Sometimes directors feel like they have to justify that hat that they are wearing they've got on as a director, and they come in and they tweak and interfere.

I just really hope that Peter Jackson and New Line Cinema can resolve all their differences. I'm hoping that's going to happen, but we'd have to wait and see. I would love to explore Middle Earth again with Peter.

Ingmar Bergman is a long way from me, but I admire him. He, too, concentrates a great deal on individuals; and although the individual is what interests him most, we are very far apart. His individuals are very different from mine; his problems are different from mine - but he's a great director. So is Fellini, for that matter.

I guess I probably see myself as a director. If I had to choose, I think that that's the aspect of the process that I'm most excited by.