How one handles success or failure is determined by their early childhood.
Harold Ramis
Life doesn't care about your vision. Stuff happens, and you've just got to deal with it. You roll with it; that's the beauty of it all.
I never work just to work. It's some combination of laziness and self-respect.
Comedy and tragedy co-exist. You can't have one without the other. I'm of the school that anything can be funny if seen from a comedic point of view.
As a director on 'The Office,' there's a tremendous weight that comes with directing features. I was being asked to direct a show that had already won an Emmy for Best Comedy. Steve Carell and the cast had already won the Screen Actor's Guild Awards.
You just make sure you don't screw it up. It's going to work as long as you don't mess it up. Hopefully you have plenty of those moments in a big comedy.
Nothing reinforces a professional relationship more than enjoying success with someone.
Chicago still remains a Mecca of the Midwest - people from both coasts are kind of amazed how good life is in Chicago and what a good culture we've got. You can have a pretty wonderful artistic life and never leave Chicago.
My characters aren't losers. They're rebels. They win by their refusal to play by everyone else's rules.
A psychologist said to me, there are only two important questions you have to ask yourself. What do you really feel? And, what do you really want? If you can answer those two, you probably can leave your neuroses behind you.
Ernie Hudson was new to the comedy world, and being the fourth Ghostbuster, he would have ideas, and he would talk to Ivan Reitman, and Ivan would kind of put him off. I could see how disappointed he was.
With both Caddyshack and Vacation, it's not like the subjects were serious enough that they engaged my interest for another round. I love the characters, and the actors were great, but I didn't see the need to make another Vacation movie.
Acting is all about big hair and funny props... All the great actors knew it. Olivier knew it, Brando knew it.
The movie 'Vacation' had a whole different ending. They never even got to the amusement park, Wallyworld, at the end of 'Vacation.' The last 20 minutes of the film was entirely different - and bombed so badly that the audience just stopped cold.
My first few films were institutional comedies, and you're on pretty safe ground when you're dealing with an institution that vast numbers of people have experienced: college, summer camp, the military, the country club.
I always point out to my Passover guests that the Hebrews were not living in isolation. They were at the crossroads of several great, elaborate cultures with their own mythology and religion and art and architecture and cultural belief. In fact, so many of the mythologies of the world describe the same events, just from different points of view.
If life only has the meaning you bring to it, we have the opportunity to bring rich meaning to our lives by the service we do for others.
Everybody has a Bill Murray story. He just punishes people for reasons they can't figure out.
Billy Crystal knows how to make people laugh. He's got 30 years on stage... there's no telling him what's funny.
I never read Playboy before I started working there and stopped reading it the day I quit.
It seems that, culturally, young people function more in groups. They know each other through digital media. All the young comedy people who work in TV are really used to working at the table with lots of writers around. They're comfortable in the group; they don't assert their own egos over everyone else.
I had a dream cast when Dan first went off and wrote 'Ghostbusters 3' by himself. It was so long ago that my dream cast was Ben Stiller, Chris Farley, and Chris Rock. That would have been cool. Now, a lot of time has passed, and there are a lot of young funny people.
I'd like to think I'd never do a gratuitous fart joke.
I believe things happen that can't be explained, but so many people seem intent on explaining them. Everyone has an answer for them. Either aliens or things from the spirit world.
There was a moment when we were casting 'Groundhog Day' when Bill Murray was not at the top of my list. He'd been getting crankier and crankier. By the end of 'Ghostbusters II', he was pretty cranky. I thought, 'Do I want to put up with this for twelve weeks?'
I always claim that the writer has done 90 percent of the director's work.
I feel a big obligation to the audience, almost in a moral sense, to say something useful. If I'm going to spend a year of my life on these things, I want something that I feel that strongly about.
The cutting room is where you discover the optimal length of the movie.
No matter what I have to say, I'm still trying to say it in comedic form.
I had a lot of fun working with John Candy. We had a pretty good rapport.
I had this 'War and Peace' thing of wanting to experience war as a kind of incredible human enterprise. I even applied to Officer Candidate School. Then the practical side of me kicked in and I thought, 'I really don't want to get drafted.' So I went down to the physical and checked every psychological disorder and drug on the medical history form.
I can't imagine a successful comedy movie without a successful comedy performance at the heart of it.
You can't not have feelings about country clubs, whichever side you're on.
I'm at my best when I'm working with really talented people, and I'm there to gently suggest or guide or inspire or contribute whatever I can to their effort.
Whenever a critic mentions the salary of an actor, I'm thinking, He's not talking about the movie.
If Chevy Chase had not been an actor, he might have been a very popular guy in advertising, or whatever field he would have gone into, because of his charisma.
The comic edge of 'Ghostbusters' will always be the same. It's still treating the supernatural with a totally mundane sensibility.
As much as we'd like to believe that our work is great and that we're infallible, we're not. Hollywood movies are made for the audience. These are not small European art films we're making.
First and foremost, you have to make the movie for yourself. And that's not to say, to hell with everyone else, but what else have you got to go on but your own taste and judgment?
I used to be married to a woman who pursued every spiritual trend with tremendous passion and dragged me along. I don't believe in anything. I'd seen mediums and readers.
I'm not a believer in the pratfall. I don't think it's funny just to have someone fall down.
I've been directing for 25 years almost, and I've only directed nine films in that time because I like to be careful.
It's like the old rule-if you introduce a gun into the first act of a play, it's going to be used in the third act. So if you do a movie about criminals, you have to accept there's going to be Some action.
Multiplicity was a movie that tested really well. People seeing the movie really liked it, but then the studio couldn't market it. We opened on a weekend with nine other films.
My job is to come up with something that you like and you agree with that you would play wholeheartedly. If we disagree, I may not be doing my job correctly.
That's one of the great things about DVD: In addition to reaching people who didn't catch the movie in theaters, you get to have this interaction of sorts.
The first comedy screenplay that I wrote was Animal House and I always thought I could and should be a director but no one was about to give me that opportunity on Animal House.
There's a personal story of my own that I will write at some point, and it's a film that I will happily make. It could very well be the next thing I do, unless someone shows me something great.
We all wish we could be in more than one place at the same time. People with families feel guilty all the time-if we spend too much time with our family, we feel we're not working hard enough.
We are all several different people. There are different aspects of our nature that are competing.
