Chill The Fuck Out and Cut Twenty Minutes
Related posts tagged 'Filmmaking'
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Related posts tagged 'Filmmaking'
Chris was always doing that bit to me at work. We shared an office, and you had to walk through our office to get to Chris Rock & Adam Sandler's office, so these 2 microscopic offices were back to back, and Chris' desk was behind mine, and he didn't really know how to write, or read, really (kidding!) but he would come in bored, because I would have to write my sketches to try to get on but they would always let him on, so he would get behind me and be bored, everyone would write him sketches, and he would say "Davey… turn around" and I said "if this is Fat Guy in a Little Coat I'm not turning around, it's not funny anymore." And he would say "no, i've got a whole new thing I'm doing."
And ...
Yes. Wait, what? Yes, I would consider doing a Dirty Work 2. But there's so much involved. I should start a kickstarter. Because the problem is Dirty Work 1 lost so much money the movie studio had to shut down. MGM had a huge loss in their quarter, and the stock owners fled, and boy, you hear a lot about that on your answering machine. So I don't know if they want to make another one. But Artie is always hilarious.
Tommy Wiseau is the master rewriter of history, because when he was making The Room I think he was completely sincere. He was aiming for [Marlon] Brando and James Dean and came out with something completely different. But when he realized that people were laughing at his film, he then rewrote his whole script [of his life]. ... He came out and said, "Oh, I intended it to be comedy." Whereas, in fact, he had kept it in theaters — on his own dime — for two weeks to qualify for the Oscars.
I think what might make this form of endeavour exciting for writers is that they find themselves in an environment where they’re encouraged to use their powers to explore the world, their minds and the form itself. Think about the staggering possibilities of the marriage of light, vibration and time. I think craft is a dangerous thing. I saw a trailer for a movie, I don’t want to say what the movie is, but it’s coming out soon. And it was gorgeous, it was... gorgeous. And it made me really depressed, and I was trying to figure out why.
I think there was an amazing amount of craft and skill on the part of the filmmakers in this movie. And yet it was the same shit. I know that this movie is g...
He is SO good, and such a method actor, that Oliver Sachs wanted to hook him up to an EEG to see if he actually duplicated the brainwaves of the actual patients. No joke.
It’s very important that what you do is specific to the medium in which you’re doing it. And that you utilize what’s specific about that medium to do the work. And if you can’t think about why it should be done this way or needs to be done this way, then it doesn’t need to be done this way and then you should figure out what it is about this – if you want to do it – that needs to be told in the form of a movie.
I like making short films. You can do anything you want in a short film because it doesn’t have the weight of a feature [film] where every moment has to serve the entire film.
If you have a weird little idea you can just go out and make a short film about it and people can watch it for a short time and then move on to whatever the next thing is they’re doing in their lives.
So I just always encourage people to make short films because it’s the one thing in film that you can always do. There are people laying all over the streets who are great and qualified and talented filmmakers, directors of photography and editors who have nothing to do and they are always eager to jump on a project wit...
That was on Louie ck's first short film called "Caesar's Salad" I played the part of "crazy pumpkin head" where I charged a group of people with a knife. Nick was one of them. We used a real knife and I dropped it on nick's foot in the scene. Went through his shoe and everything. He had to go the hospital. But he did get a bit out of it.
Question: You've worked with a lot of the same people since your early 20s (Bridges, Elswit, Tichenor, Sellar etc). Did you pick these people very carefully out of admiration for their work, or was it more coincidental? Especially with Elswit - did you immediately know this was your guy?
Answer: Elswit was the only one who had a resume. The rest of us all found each other and started getting to work - big dreams and all...
Elswit was nice enough to work with me and teach me everything. He was and is my hero.
Related posts tagged 'Inside baseball'
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Related posts tagged 'Inside baseball'
Not necessarily like, "What's the blow for the end of Act 2?" But big-picture things of how should I live my life, how to handle this person, jobs to take or not take, ways of managing people.
The first time we did it, Fred just starting doing that voice ("Whaaaaaat are you doing here?!") and Kristen and I were like "What?" It was so funny. I hadn't heard him do it before. Man o man it made me laugh. Then it became a game of who could stretch out the vowels in their sentences the most. It got crazy.
Chris was always doing that bit to me at work. We shared an office, and you had to walk through our office to get to Chris Rock & Adam Sandler's office, so these 2 microscopic offices were back to back, and Chris' desk was behind mine, and he didn't really know how to write, or read, really (kidding!) but he would come in bored, because I would have to write my sketches to try to get on but they would always let him on, so he would get behind me and be bored, everyone would write him sketches, and he would say "Davey… turn around" and I said "if this is Fat Guy in a Little Coat I'm not turning around, it's not funny anymore." And he would say "no, i've got a whole new thing I'm doing."
And ...
Constantly. We all thought he was crazy. Little did we know!
You could never do it. You could never recreate these guys [The Marx Brothers]. Remember they did that Three Stooges movie? My manager, George Shapiro, says trying to get someone to act like a comedian is like trying to get them to act like a baseball player. It’s almost impossible. There’s so many tiny polished movements they have that the best actors struggle to replicate. I mean, Dustin Hoffman is a wonderful actor, I love him. But he can’t do stand-up. Because actors are acting. Comedians are talking to a group of people as if they are an individual. They are locked in on those people. They’re not really thinking about performing. The focus is who they’re talking to. There’s a certain ob...
It was probably about 2009. I was getting a little bit of work in New York, but still day jobbing it, still nothing going for me. I was doing a comedy club and she happened to walk in on the one bit that worked. She came in the green room and said, “Hey, I like your vibe. I think we would work well together.” She was nobody at the time. I was like, “I’ll take any work I can get.” We took the train to Hofstra and had dinner with her mom. I was kissing her ass the whole time because she was a bigger comedian who was helping me out. We hit it off and she gave me a bunch of dates and that was it. We went all over the country. I watched her blow up, do TV shows, get on the Charlie Sheen roast, Co...
And how was it making out with Natalie? I mean... when you have a kissing scene in a film it's not something you think about as a kissing thing. You have all these crew around. But she's a lovely kisser, very polite.
But here's a little-known fact: there's one person in the world that both Ashton and I have kissed, and that's Natalie Portman.
The Joe Dirt wig was itchy. And one time, I walked away from the set at a TV studio when we were doing some Dennis Miller stuff, and I got lost, and I had my janitor's uniform on, and the security guard wouldn't let me back into where I was supposed to go, and I didn't have a cell phone, so I had to sit there for 15 minutes until some PA came to look for me, and I had to explain to them that I was dressed as a janitor with a wig on, and that was an actual story, that sounds fake but it was funny to me. Long story short: I loved the wig, I thought it was hilarious, it was hard to wear all summer but it cracks me up. I think it's in some vault somewhere in the Smithsonian right now, surrounded...
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