Paul Feig Quotes

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."

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.

I always hated high-school shows and high-school movies, because they were always about the cool kids. It was always about dating and sex, and all the popular kids, and the good-looking kids. And the nerds were super-nerdy cartoons, with tape on their glasses. I never saw 'my people' portrayed accurately.

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

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.

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 was brought up in a very religious household and did a lot of praying throughout a big part of my life and always thought of God as being not only a powerful father figure and the ruler of all time and dimension but also as a friend with whom I could chat and ask questions to and get advice from.

I've always enjoyed people studying themselves in the mirror, and I also enjoy those 'walk and feel bad' shots. I like anything that isolates people and focuses them on themselves, or makes us focus on their faces as they're going through something.

That's the thing with women's movies - there's so much about kind of catfighting. And my experience is women aren't - look, we all get in fights with people, but it's not that face-to-face aggression.

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?

'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.

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.'

You just have to be classy at the end of the day. That doesn't mean you can't go with a midnight blue tux. And if you can find a deep red tux that looks classy and classic, I think you can pull it off.

Throughout my teens, I just wanted to go somewhere I could wear a Donald Duck pin and no one would care.

I love the pictures of Old Hollywood, seeing the directors dressed in suits and ties. Even the grips would be wearing ties. But the biggest thing is when I was a kid, I couldn't wait to be an adult, and I think what happens with most guys is that no one wants to be an adult anymore. So they're dressing like kids.

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.

'Constitutional' is just a real pip of a word. Positively rolls off the tongue. In fact, it's downright fun to say. 'Con-stit-too-shun-al.' It's the verbal equivalent of skipping down the street with an ice cream cone in your hand. It's like a semantic bag of Lays potato chips. You simply can't just say it once.

If you're not connected emotionally to a story, then you're dead. You're really just opening the door for people to lose interest and their minds to wander, for them to start picking it apart.

I really feed off of The Walking Dead

Ever since I was a little kid, I've felt comfortable in a suit. It all started when my mom bought me a three-piece Pierre Cardin suit. I wore that thing everywhere. Eventually I realized I was going to be the kid who got beat up in school, but I kept wearing it.

So, what happened next will have to go down in my book of Bad Decisions, planted firmly in the chapter entitled, I have no idea what I was thinking

I'm glad I took the leap away from acting into going behind the camera because it's much more satisfying - I love acting and I still do, but it's much more satisfying to be able to make the stuff.

What's so great about working with really funny women is that vanity comes second. Whatever makes it real and funny, they're going to go for, and it's just great.

I have an inability to enjoy things, but that's why we're in comedy. If we were happy, we wouldn't be funny, I guess.

I'm extremely, extremely lucky to be who I am and do what I do and work with the people I work with. Even though I can always find something to complain about, I find it very hard to complain.

I've never had to get a job as a waiter or anything. I've always been able to support myself in 'the biz.' Which is great. It's really fantastic to be able to say that, because I know it's hard to do.

With a suit, even if you're having a nervous breakdown, you still look like you're in charge.

As a director, I really wanted to learn and I needed to get away from my own stuff to figure out how to just do things and work with good people.

The director is the only person on the set who has seen the film. Your job as a director is to show up every day and know where everything will fit into the film.

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.

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.

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'm from Mt. Clemens, Michigan. It's right outside Detroit. The suburbs. I was always very heavily involved in theater back then. I was always in drama club or forensics. Anything that you could do that had some performing, I was doing it.

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

What's great about the geek spirit is that life never seems to stop us, and they never seem to kill our enthusiasm, our optimism and our hunger to experience the world. We keep our sense of humor, we protect our dignity, we talk to our friends about the experience and then we start again fresh the very next day.

What you want is the thing that critics love and audiences love, but that's the hardest thing to do.

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.

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.

The reason most comedies don't win awards is that the filmmakers put the comedy first. This means you have to create a story around the jokes.

I'm not looking for people to bow down to me or do things in my name or even pass around a collection plate for me. I say that I'd like to be God for a while because He really can get away with anything. I mean, ANYTHING.

Hey, I'm like the Wayne Gretsky of the entertainment biz - I have other people do my dirty work while I skate around and get to be a nice guy. What can I say? I'm a coward.

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.'

You want a happy ending, but not such a ridiculous happy ending that it doesn't mean anything to anybody.

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

A lot of comedies fall apart because they just go from joke to joke, and the characters are all sort of being crazy off on their own.

The hard thing is getting people to come to the theater to see something, no matter if it's good or not.

Women comedy is different than men comedy. Guy comedy is very aggressive, it's about insulting each other, name-calling, and kind of busting each other's chops, and that's not what women's comedy is.

The good thing is that I really think that American television is in kind of a second golden age. Even though there's a lot of reality and all those contest shows, which aren't my kind of shows, the scripted stuff that's going on is so good right now because of basic cable. Everyone has stepped it up and realised that people like quality.

When I went to high school, in the late 1970s, disco was in full swing and anyone who was into it dressed the part. I know I did.

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.

I find that so many times when somebody tries to go back in, it sort of isn't as good and you wish they hadn't done it.

As far I'm concerned, being an adult is way more fun than being a kid. But then I was a kid who wanted to be an adult. I'd watch shows like 'Bewitched' and see Darren come home and mix a martini and I'd go, 'That looks awesome! I want to do that!'

People are like, "Why are you all dressed up? Did you dress up just for me?" I'm like "No, I dressed up because I'm an adult and I felt like putting on my suit." But I love it. Tom Ford and Ralph Lauren are my two heroes of clothing designers.

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.

My wife and I don't have kids and people are down on us about it. But we're just not wired that way, so don't tell me I have to.

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.

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

I always feel in improv that nothing is ever as good once it's repeated.

I love funny people, and when I'm with funny people, or people who are amusing in their weirdness, I love it. Because that to me is funny, as opposed to someone who stops and says, 'Hey let me tell you a joke.'

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

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

Don't kid yourself munster

At the end of the day the question comes, what are you doing for the world? You have to try to do something that's going to add something positive.

I don't like weddings. I never have. I find moments in them I really like, but I always look at them like, "Oh my God, we have to go to a wedding." My problem with weddings is that they are just too long.

For years, it's driven me crazy that women don't have better roles, especially in comedies. I know so many funny women but I always felt ... misogynist streak is too strong a term - but a dismissiveness.

I was a standup comedian, which is kind of like writing and directing yourself.

I'm just an enormous British comedy fan.

The dueling maturity levels in high school is such a source of comedy to me. I was always such a late developer. I was last to walk. I was last to ride a bike. I was last to have sex. That's why it's fun to portray one side of your childhood onscreen.

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!'

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."

One of the biggest things you have is your reputation and your reputation with knowing what's good and what's not good.

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.'