A Quote by Terry Zwigoff

I did turn down 'The Virgin Suicides.' I talked to the producers about it, and I just honestly told them that I didn't get it. Is it supposed to be funny, is it a thriller, what is it?
When I wrote The Virgin Suicides, I gave myself very strict rules about the narrative voice: the boys would only be able to report what they had seen or found or what had been told to them.
If you look before the '90s, you might not find many - if any - albums with multiple producers. It just didn't exist in the history of music. That would have been like Michael Jackson telling Quincy Jones, 'Look man, I know we did well on 'Off The Wall,' but I'm hot now, and I need to see some other producers for 'Thriller.''
But when I did think about it and looked at the whole package - the producers behind the show, the writers, the cast I would be working with - I would have been a fool to turn it down just because the role for me was another gay role.
David Zucker was great! Those guys are funny. I mean, they are funny. There's a wonderful thing about doing that kind of work like Superhero Movie: You have to be real, but you also have to get the laugh. There you are, your director and the producers are right there at the monitors, and you either get the laugh or you don't. And so you just do it until you get the laugh.
I think that sometimes, as producers, we just service the artists who's really just the main front or person. You know, our roles are really just to help them get where they're supposed to go.
I am much more likely to care about someone trying to be funny and give them some credit for whatever he or she did that was remotely funny than I am to be mused by somebody declaring this isn't funny, that isn't funny, this sucks. If you want to write humor, you're going to have to get used to that.
Fidel Castro just talked a long time, and he talked and he talked and he talked and he talked... and he talked during the meeting. I think it was about four hours. But I guess that's part of the Castro spirit.
The funny thing I thought was, no matter what, people talked bad about cops. But as soon as something bad happened, when their car got stolen, who was the first person they called? Police officers. They expected them to help out and take care of them to get their stolen car back, and they did. That, to me, was a pretty big thing.
Nic [Cage] is more than just a fantastic actor. He will get your movie made. The first thing that we did is that we went to producers and there were a lot of great producers.
Gwynn, she was always talking about wanting to be drunk and honestly I did want to encourage that, I wanted to go to a bar with her and let all the stuff sobriety pushed down be released so I could catch it in my palms and finally kiss her. She was just so sad. Melancholy was a fleshy wave permanently cresting on her face, she had to speak through it when she talked.
The interesting thing was we never talked about pottery. Bernard [Leach] talked about social issues; he talked about the world political situation, he talked about the economy, he talked about all kinds of things.
The cardinal rule for any performer is that they should know themselves before they enter the spotlight, and I didn't. I was just Neil and I did what I was supposed to do. I was supposed to get married, so I got married. I was supposed to get a job, so I looked for work.
Most producers today are little bedroom producers and then they get their record and get signed by an agency and go on the road, but they have no idea about DJ-ing. They have no culture about where that music comes from and they just stand behind the booth, put their hand in the air, and play all the hits.
The scenes in 'The Virgin Suicides' where Elle Fanning is ice skating are really amazing.
I did a lot of serious plays, and I did the Oxford Review as well, which is supposed to be funny, but I'm not sure how funny we were when we did it. Then, when I finished my course, it was only then that I decided to go to drama school and try and do acting because I was enjoying it so much and so on.
Sometimes, comics will make the observation that it's not jokes that are funny, it's characters that are funny. And isn't that true! That's why I always kill jokes. I'm terrible at them, because I get the joke right, but I can't get the character right, and it just goes down like a lead balloon.
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