Top 129 Quotes & Sayings by Paul Feig - Page 2

I've never been to a class reunion or anything because I'm always afraid of that one - there's going to be some 'Carrie'-like incident.

Getting away from a white or light colored tuxedo shirt is always a little dangerous. Certain staples shouldn't be mixed with. Light pink or blue is not bad, but again, you're just breaking from a classic.

At the end of the day, I just want a movie that's great, that people are going to love and laugh at and be affected by, and also have an emotional journey.

At the end of the day if you want to entertain people, you've got to take your ego out of the equation.

Whatever you wear, you have to own it. Make it yours.

I can't impress enough upon people that if you tell an honest story that people relate to and people believe and invest in, you can do anything.

The greatest way for people to experience a comedy is to go in not knowing anything about it. But because of marketing, it's impossible. Marketing meaning that in order to get people to come you can't just go, 'Hey, there's a great movie - we're not going to show you anything from it but trust us!'

What I don't like is when I see stuff that I know has had a lot of improv done or is playing around where there's no purpose to the scene other than to just be funny. What you don't want is funny scene, funny scene, funny scene, and now here's the epiphany scene and then the movie's over.

You need to have one element about your outfit that is imperfect, that says you live in it and you're not letting it control you. I think men and women both need a softness about them with formal wear.

So many stars who have shows are intimidated by having people around them be funnier than them. It's always the unsuccessful ones. Look at Seinfeld - he's great because he let everyone be hilarious.

Where there seems to be a difference between guys being nuts and women being nuts is that guys are much more open in calling each other on stuff; lots of insults and dirty names. Whereas women will talk frankly and honesty, but there also seems to be more passive aggressiveness.

As tempting as it seems to wear tennis shoes with your tux, don't do it. I think it looks ridiculous. If you're 14 years old, maybe give it a shot. In general, don't portray anything that says 'I'm too cool and I don't care.'

Yeah, you know, I like to throw myself on the sword so that others may feel better about themselves. I tell the stories that you all want to forget, but when you remember it, it hopefully makes you laugh.

I couldn't be happier to not be acting. I miss it, but I don't miss the auditioning or trying to get work.

Women's humor seems to be a little more supportive. It's just kind of trying to make the other one laugh through funny voices and kind of talking about other people. I respond to that. I feel less like I'm going to get beat up in a room full of women than I do in a room full of guys.

There's nothing worse than the sequel that's a letdown from the first movie.

Man up and add a tux to your wardrobe. Just find one you like and get it well-tailored to your own measurements.

We didn't used to be so precious about women in comedy back in the old days.

Katie Dippold, who I wrote the script with, she's very into ghosts and all that. So I go, "Hey, why don't you talk to Katie?"

Hollywood is a business and movie studios are only going to do what's going to make money. It's not an altruistic thing. They are blatant grabs for money. Responsible studios want to make quality pictures, but at the same time nobody is going to make quality pictures they know aren't going to make any money.

So many of my friends have always been women growing up... I always feel slightly more comfortable around women because with guys in general there's always more of a danger zone... it's very aggressive sometimes the way guys act with each other, putting each other down and calling each other names, so I was always too sensitive for that and used to hang out with the girls. And they were always really funny to me.

Who knew there were so many ghosts to be busted in the world?

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.

That's what I love about the mockumentary style, is the added thing of people knowing they are on-camera, which changes your behavior. That's why we sometimes do what we call spy shots.

I think things go wrong when there's not a very specific plan and specific emotional roadmap. You need to know what a scene needs to get across, and what story point that needs to be advanced, whether it's discovering someone for the first time or whether it's seeing a relationship get strained. What I do as a director is really create a safe environment that everyone can feel very comfortable in and experiment within so that they don't hold back anything.

God does things that fly completely in the face of what we've all been taught that He is supposed to do and every time He does this, we all just say, 'Oh, well, I guess there must be some good reason why He did that.

I really feed off of The Walking Dead.

Many Republicans have always reminded me of professional WWF wrestlers. They come into the ring all pumped up and acting like they're invincible and that they're going to destroy their opponent. Then they get hit once and fall down and roll around in agony and suddenly seem immobilized by pain, calling for the ref to intervene.

You have to know everything. You have to know how to light a scene. You have to know all this technical stuff about directing. No, you don't. You can know as much or as little as you have to. Your main job is to get great performances and tell the story correctly and capture it correctly. Then it's just basically yours to complicate or simplify as much as you want.

The greatest way for people to experience a comedy is to go in not knowing anything about it. But because of marketing, it's impossible. Marketing meaning that in order to get people to come you can't just go, 'Hey, there's a great movie - we're not going to show you anything from it but trust us!

To me, there's nothing funnier than funny people in peril, because it's just a great springboard for people to be at a heightened emotionality and things get funnier.

One of the many things I want to do is dig us out of that hole so that guys, in particular, can go: "Oh, yeah. Those people are really funny. I've seen that person. It's a woman. They are funny."

I don't want to do anything to revisit Freaks and Geeks that isn't awesome.

I'm not a painter who's saying, "I want people to see my work when I die; it will be this and that." That's not satisfying to me.

Why is a movie starring women considered a gimmick and a movie starring men is just a normal movie?

I always felt, and still feel, one of my best strengths as a director is having been an actor for a long time. Nobody knows actors and their insecurities and strengths and everything more than somebody who's done it before.

The biggest thing I’ve heard for the last four months is, ‘Thanks for ruining my childhood’.

Internationally and in foreign markets, movies starring women don't make as much money as movies starring men. And then you can blame filmmakers, especially in comedy, which is my bread and butter, because it's become a bit of a boys' club over the years. With the boys in charge you get these takes on women which are either the girlfriend or the mean wife or the girl who appears in a romantic comedy. You're just getting either men's fantasies about women or what they think is the reality about women instead of men just having a healthy attitude about women.

I try not to blame the public, because the public - men, especially - have seen not great portrayals of women in supporting roles, because they're not given the lead roles a lot of the time. Especially in comedy, they're relegated to the adversary, which is like "the mean girlfriend."

Handheld camera is approximating what we're seeing when we're looking at each other, and kind of looking around, and your eyes whipping around. It adds an immediacy, where you feel like you are watching something through your own eyes, standing there with them. And that just allows you to take more liberties and have more fun with people's behavior.

I hate that we're always called "the all-female Ghostbusters," because you wouldn't refer to the original as "the all-male Ghostbusters."

As tempting as it seems to wear tennis shoes with your tux, don't do it. I think it looks ridiculous. If you're 14 years old, maybe give it a shot. In general, don't portray anything that says 'I'm too cool and I don't care.

I'm really a skeptic. I'm kind of not a believer in the paranormal.

I'm a pretty feminized geek, you know? I have that point of view, I grew up around a lot of girls, so I'm pretty sensitive to that. But I don't dare say 'I know how women think.

If you're not connected emotionally to a story, then you're dead. You're as a filmmaker really just opening the door for people to lose interest and their minds to wander, for them to start picking it apart. That's what people will do, people will naturally tear stuff apart because they're trapped with it, they paid money for it. And they came into it wanting to love it. So all you can really do is piss off the audience. Unless you do things right.

In a perfect world, I'd love to make 90-minute movies, but for me, a movie needs to be as long or short as it can sustain itself.

I just love Kate. [Bieber], to me, is one of the funniest impressions because it's so all encompassing. It's like a total body and soul impression. But that's Kate. Every character she does is that way.

If some magic thing happens, and everybody goes completely nuts, and does something we never thought of, the cameras catch everything. That comes from having camera people who are almost like actors and writers themselves.

Everybody who's making the movies needs to work hard to make sure they're good. And if you don't show up and see the movies and support them financially, no one is going to make them. It's going to change unless it makes money. That's the long and short of it. You have to give in to the fact that it's a business.

When guys see a movie starring women, they go, "That must be filled with these characters I see in these movies who are such a drag." And that's just bad for everybody.

I’ve never been comfortable around groups of guys when it gets into the putting-down. My past being a kind of geek - it kind of turns into an attack on the weakest of the group.

The greatest movies are the ones you want to watch again and again.

Scripts are a house of cards and you can't just reach in the middle and pull out the middle card because the house of cards will fall down. But at a certain point you almost have to allow that house of cards to get knocked down a few times because you need to make it sturdier. How many times do you hear, "No, that doesn't make sense," or "Why would this happen?" That was a mistake. You shouldn't have those moments, because the moment you're knocked out of the story, then you're dead. And all you can go is moment to moment,or joke to joke. And that's gonna wear people out.

I've made a career making stuff that nobody sees, so anything that I can do to help make something that people are going to enjoy and want to see over and over again, then I'm there.

"Nuclear" is nothing but trouble. Do you say "new-clear" or do you say "nuke-you-ler"? Whoever invented that word had obviously never studied the human mouth. We don't have enough muscles in our face to make that group of letters come out smoothly. The word is missing a middle syllable, for cryin' out loud.

If you made a movie that no man in the world went near, but every woman in the world went to, you'd have the highest grossing movie of all time. You'd make trillions of dollars. But I don't want to make movies that are just for the ladies. I don't want to ghettoize any audience that way.

I really put my heart and soul into everything and I don't want a project that doesn't feel real to me or I don't get invested in. In order to drive a show for eight or 10 years or whatever the target for doing a show is, it really has to be a part of you. Because then I can come up with stories for seasons and seasons on end. I wish I had the ability to just like the idea and get people in and drive it that way through their enthusiasm. For me, it has to be a little more of a personal thing, even if it's not a completely personal story.

I'm more of a science head, so I was like, how would a guy use - if there were ghosts - technology to bring them back?

Film, television, and working with a camera is such an intimate art form that if a camera is right on you, and I've got your face filling the screen, you have to be real. If you do anything that is fake, you're not going to get away with it, because the camera is right there, and the story is being told in a very real way.

Any ensemble - they didn't call it "the all-male Expendables," for example. But it's Hollywood's fault that people say that, because there have been so few movies that have allowed women to have these leading roles, so that's Hollywood's fault.