Harold Ramis Quotes
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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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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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If the only ideas you had were your own, you'd be very limited.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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I can't imagine a successful comedy movie without a successful comedy performance at the heart of it.
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I never read Playboy before I started working there and stopped reading it the day I quit.
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It's like the old rule-if you introduce a gun into the first act of a play, it's going to be used in the third act. So if you do a movie about criminals, you have to accept there's going to be Some action.
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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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Everybody has a Bill Murray story. He just punishes people for reasons they can't figure out.
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That's one of the great things about DVD: In addition to reaching people who didn't catch the movie in theaters, you get to have this interaction of sorts.
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How one handles success or failure is determined by their early childhood.
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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 not a believer in the pratfall. I don't think it's funny just to have someone fall down.
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There was a moment when we were casting 'Groundhog Day' when Bill Murray was not at the top of my list. He'd been getting crankier and crankier. By the end of 'Ghostbusters II', he was pretty cranky. I thought, 'Do I want to put up with this for twelve weeks?'
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As a director on 'The Office,' there's a tremendous weight that comes with directing features. I was being asked to direct a show that had already won an Emmy for Best Comedy. Steve Carell and the cast had already won the Screen Actor's Guild Awards.
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As much as we'd like to believe that our work is great and that we're infallible, we're not. Hollywood movies are made for the audience. These are not small European art films we're making.
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There's a personal story of my own that I will write at some point, and it's a film that I will happily make. It could very well be the next thing I do, unless someone shows me something great.