Gene Wilder Quotes

When the protagonist breaks the fourth wall by looking at the camera in a movie, it's generally been used for comedic purposes, rather than feeling like they're looking into your soul.

Dan Harmon has this idea that characters on TV are allowed to talk about their favorite movies and TV shows and songs.

There's always something at least a little smug about self-reference - magazine articles about idealistic journalists, TV shows about TV actors, ironic films within ironic-er films: all this meta-media populated by thinly disguised characters making oblique inside jokes.

One of the problems in modern comics is that they keep referencing themselves endlessly.

I love breaking the fourth wall, and being given permission to play with the audience!

Mystery Science Theater is really a postmodern show, it's really derived of many influences.

It is the idea that it's a movie in a movie. So I did it.

People think that direct address was invented by Ferris Bueller, but in fact, it wasn't. It was invented by Shakespeare.

As a comedy writer, I'm always praying for the day I can tell a self-aware/break-the-fourth-wall style of joke.

Meta-fiction doesn't depend on the illusion that you're reading about real people.

You never saw Peter Sellers the actor trying to make you laugh. All he was doing was the character. What I'm saying is that I don't think you should know you're in a movie. I don't like it when actors are winking at the audience and saying, 'Right, isn't this funny? Are you with me?'

It may sound surprising, but a joke and a crime novel work in very much the same way. The comedian/writer leads their audience along the garden path. The audience know what's coming, or at least they think they do until they get hit from a direction they were not expecting.

Within the structure of 'Scream 4,' there is the film within a film, but that's been part of the 'Scream' franchise since 'Scream 2,' when you had the 'Stab' franchise.

Here's my take on Andy Kaufman... For Kaufman, comedy was a skill that was open for examination. He didn't just do comedy, he deconstructed it like it was a transistor set. He pulled out all the wires and switched them around, often in front of our very eyes.

Basic Instinct 2' is camp, not because it takes itself too seriously, nor because it sends itself up, but because we are not sure quite how seriously it wants us to take it.

A lot of the times, reality shows don't like people to break the fourth wall. With a docu-series or a documentary, everyone breaks the fourth wall because you're talking to the camera quite a bit.

Basic Instinct 2' is an uneasy experience because, although it is hyper-reflexive to the point where it is hard to think of one character, one scene, one plot twist that isn't a reference or an echo, there is nothing knowing about it. No matter how absurd the film gets, it refuses to raise its eyebrows.

In the sense that Watchmen references movies, comic books, pop culture in general. It knows it's a movie. I really do like movies that ride that fine line, the razor's edge between parody and supporting the fake movie part of the movie.

When you hide another story in a story, that’s the story I am telling the children.

If Realism called it like it saw it, Metafiction simply called it as it saw itself seeing itself see it.

The postmodern reply to the modern consists of recognizing that the past, since it cannot really be destroyed, because its destruction leads to silence, must be revisited: but with irony, not innocently. I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows he cannot say to her, I love you madly, because he knows that she knows (and that she knows that he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still, there is a solution. He can say, As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly.

Merely corroborative detail, intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative.

I don't think the 'what' distinguishes a good novel from a bad one but rather the 'how.'

The characters are telling you the story. I'm not telling you the story, they're going to do it. If I do it right, you will get the whole story.

Sometimes they're all collectively thinking, "Wow, we're kinda a shitty audience," and then if you point it out, it's kinda like, "Hey, I know what's going on. We know what's going on up here. Or what's not going on. And I'm letting you know that I know. And now we can fix this."