Rod Lurie Quotes

The thing that is incredibly helpful is that we screen the movies and we ask the audience if they like it or not and we ask a lot of questions and do testing on the movies. For comedies, at least, it's very helpful. If they're not laughing and they don't say that they loved it, then I have screwed up.

When you do comedy in front of an audience, they are the ones who tell you whether it's funny or not and which bits are funny and which bits need to be fixed.

I don't know what's funny and what's not so I test out all of my material in front of audiences.

A lot of filmmakers hate testing movies. I love it because it's an audience medium. The biggest problem has been the prevalence of all these Internet sites. It's almost impossible to have a test screening without it leaking out on the Internet.

In comedy, though, it's good to get feedback from the audience about what they find funny.

I like test screenings. I like to see a movie with an audience of strangers. I think it tells you a lot.

Comedy can be more difficult than drama. It requires more attention to timing. In the theater, you're always dependent on the audience for the energy, but in comedy the feedback you get is more important. You can judge by the quickness and the length of the laugh just where you stand with the audience.

It's a big part of what we do - we test our movies extensively. I'm always there myself. It's sometimes difficult to sit through, especially if it's a version of the movie that's not working particularly well.

When you do a drama, you are challenged to trust your inner voice much more. Because when you put a comedy in front of even a 25-person screening, you know whether it's working or not. The barometer is overt.

Before YouTube, I used to show videos at film festivals, and that was good and constructive. Watching things with an audience is a great way to gauge - it's pretty clear what's working in comedy when there's a joke and people laugh or don't laugh.

You never really know until you put the movie in front of an audience. I am a big advocate of screenings, which are getting harder and harder to do nowadays.

Occasionally, we would shoot something and think, 'This is it; we are over the line.' But the test audiences didn't have a problem with it.

I know what I want to talk about, but I don't really know what's funny about a joke until I perform it in front of an audience.

One of our big tools is screening. We screen usually 12 times, which is much more than most filmmakers do, and we recut in between each one, because we really need to feel how the audience is reacting to the movie.

I'm the biggest proponent of test screenings now. There's two ways to face test screenings. For dramas, I don't know if I would rely on them as much, although I still think you need them, because you're making a movie for an audience at the end of the day. But with comedy... You could go through a script or anything I ever worked on, where you go, "This is hilarious," and you put it in front of people and you get nothing. And then the other side of it, is something you're like, "I think this is really stupid," and it gets a giant laugh.

Sometimes I go to a test screening and look at the audience in line, and I start to go, "Okay, I bet this is going to work, and this isn't going to work." It's weird, but just going and facing the music and putting it out before a crowd, even before it starts playing, that exercise of putting it up on a screen for people makes you realize things even before it starts rolling. It's really weird. I've heard other people say that, too.

I've come to realize that you're going to get criticized no matter what. Somebody will always hate what you write, especially if you write humor for a fairly broad audience. Somebody will always find it not funny and declare you're not funny anymore. And sometimes people are just crazy.

Comedy is the only profession where love from a stranger is better than love from a family member. You need to perform for strangers to see if you're really funny. If they laugh and cheer, it's the greatest thing in the world.

Every group needs a comedian. A comic who is politically incorrect at the Berkeley campus might slay them at a Klan rally.

I came to the conclusion that in comedy, everybody gets what they need, whereas in horror, everybody gets what they deserve. I decided that at the end of the day, I was going to give everybody what they needed.

With a comedy, it's so important to see it with an audience and an audience who really wants to be there and is enthusiastic, otherwise it can be quite a traumatizing experience.

All my TV shows are done live in front of audiences, and all the material I take on the road and travel with them test them for hundreds and hundreds of shows before I shoot them for TV.

There are only a few genres, horror and comedy, where you can get that immediate feedback from the audience. It's very gratifying when that's what you're going for, and you can hear the reactions in all the places that you intended.

There's always something every night that I learn from reacting to what the audience is reacting to. You learn what to leave out, what to put in, if you need a little more comedy or more drama.

Jokes that make me laugh out loud when I write them almost always bomb. I have no idea why.