Paul Feig Quotes

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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?

Wearing a tuxedo isn't as simple as it sounds. I've been to a lot of award shows in Hollywood over the years and have seen some pretty sad tuxes. It's surprisingly easy to go off the rails.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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'm kind of a failure. I mean, I'll be honest. I'm successful in that I'm getting to work on great stuff, but I think I'm a failure in all the personal stuff that is most important to me.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

At the end of the day, successful box office just means that more people saw what you did and liked it, and that to me is the most important thing. That a lot of people saw it and liked it.

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.

I mean Ally McBeal was sort of the closest thing I can think of to kind of being a comedy-drama but that had its own kind of style that meant it got kind of big sometimes. But it was a great show.

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.

I'm just an enormous British comedy fan.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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."

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.

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

I really feed off of The Walking Dead.

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

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?"

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.