Paul Feig Quotes

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.

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.

In my years of acting, the one thing I was never able to do convincingly was to laugh on camera. Fake-laugh.

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

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.

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.

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.

I'm just an enormous British comedy fan.

I really feed off of The Walking Dead.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

You can never have a thousand percent batting average on jokes - it's just never going to happen.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.'

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.

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.

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.

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.

My style of comedy is very real and bittersweet, and sort of always on the verge of kind of being tragic.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Every director should take an acting class.

What you never want to do is have a story that doesn't track emotionally, because then you're going joke to joke and you're going to fatigue the audience. The only thing that's going to string them to the next joke is how successful the previous joke is.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

'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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.