Harold Ramis Quotes
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Chicago still remains a Mecca of the Midwest - people from both coasts are kind of amazed how good life is in Chicago and what a good culture we've got. You can have a pretty wonderful artistic life and never leave Chicago.
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My first few films were institutional comedies, and you're on pretty safe ground when you're dealing with an institution that vast numbers of people have experienced: college, summer camp, the military, the country club.
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Life doesn't care about your vision. Stuff happens, and you've just got to deal with it. You roll with it; that's the beauty of it all.
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With both Caddyshack and Vacation, it's not like the subjects were serious enough that they engaged my interest for another round. I love the characters, and the actors were great, but I didn't see the need to make another Vacation movie.
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The movie 'Vacation' had a whole different ending. They never even got to the amusement park, Wallyworld, at the end of 'Vacation.' The last 20 minutes of the film was entirely different - and bombed so badly that the audience just stopped cold.
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It seems that, culturally, young people function more in groups. They know each other through digital media. All the young comedy people who work in TV are really used to working at the table with lots of writers around. They're comfortable in the group; they don't assert their own egos over everyone else.
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If the only ideas you had were your own, you'd be very limited.
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'Analyze This' is a good movie because Robert De Niro and Billy Crystal are really good. But without the material to put on the play, of course, they couldn't be good. For me, it starts with the writing. I always think that the writer is doing the vast majority of the director's work, in a sense.
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I'm at my best when I'm working with really talented people, and I'm there to gently suggest or guide or inspire or contribute whatever I can to their effort.
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How one handles success or failure is determined by their early childhood.
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Acting is all about big hair and funny props... All the great actors knew it. Olivier knew it, Brando knew it.
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I really only worked for about a month on 'Meatballs.' What happened was that Ivan Reitman figured out that studios wanted to meet everybody involved with 'Animal House' except the producer. So he thought he'd better start directing.
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There's a critic that I love, Manohla Dargis of the 'L.A. Weekly.' I like the underground point of view; it's my old radical sympathies. Maybe I like her because she likes my movies.
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I can't imagine a successful comedy movie without a successful comedy performance at the heart of it.
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I had a dream cast when Dan first went off and wrote 'Ghostbusters 3' by himself. It was so long ago that my dream cast was Ben Stiller, Chris Farley, and Chris Rock. That would have been cool. Now, a lot of time has passed, and there are a lot of young funny people.
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I feel a big obligation to the audience, almost in a moral sense, to say something useful. If I'm going to spend a year of my life on these things, I want something that I feel that strongly about.
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I never work just to work. It's some combination of laziness and self-respect.
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No matter what I have to say, I'm still trying to say it in comedic form.
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My job is to come up with something that you like and you agree with that you would play wholeheartedly. If we disagree, I may not be doing my job correctly.
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Everybody has a Bill Murray story. He just punishes people for reasons they can't figure out.
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The cutting room is where you discover the optimal length of the movie.
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If life only has the meaning you bring to it, we have the opportunity to bring rich meaning to our lives by the service we do for others.
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I would remake 'Club Paradise.' I thought the story was cool, the setting was great. Everything lined up, except I wrote it for Bill Murray and John Cleese.
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Comedy and tragedy co-exist. You can't have one without the other. I'm of the school that anything can be funny if seen from a comedic point of view.