Jay Chandrasekhar Quotes
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I'm from Chicago. And I was an actor in high school and college, and I wanted to see if I could make a run of it in this job. So, I went downtown in Chicago, and I went up on a stand-up stage and did an open mic. It went well, so I'm like, 'Alright, I'll give it another try.'
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Making an independent film is so great because you're your boss. And you have to be disciplined. You know? Because there's nobody telling you anything. But you have to kinda, you know, if you have an instinct to do something, you do it. There's nobody to run it by.
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Integrity matters. What our fans think matters.
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I've never thrown a javelin. What kind of sport is that? It's hilarious.
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The thing about our movies is, we write thirty drafts. That's a very detailed script. Which means that if you try to crank it out week to week in television, it's impossible.
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Colgate is the epitome of having it both ways. Academically, it ranks in the top twenty schools in the country, but it is also a famous party school.
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With 'Puddle Cruiser,' the first 15 minutes are the weakest. When you're total unknowns and you have a weak opening, it's a real problem. At some screenings, we'd see the odd walkout before the movie even got going. But to counteract that, we'd do sketches before the show to introduce the film.
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This career is a relentless hustle because Hollywood is crowded with too many smart, talented people pursuing the same dream and the same pool of entertainment investment dollars. And unlike in law or medicine, there are no college degrees required - no barriers to entry.
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'Smokey and the Bandit' is tough and funny.
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In the summer of 2000, four college friends and I grew mustaches, bought highway patrol uniforms, and shot a $1.2 million budgeted independent film called 'Super Troopers.'
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I think, in a film that's supposed to last an hour and a half, I think you have to really pay attention to what kind of movie you're making, what is the audience experiencing, and does this joke fit with this joke?
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History is ultimately storytelling. I think the more stories you write in life - and I've written a lot of screenplays, a lot of short stories - you realize it's your interpretation of events that people read, and they absorb that.
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You see any movie, and it's just a feat of human strength and perseverance. It is a brutally challenging business.
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Ultimately, in regular television, you've got seven or eight executives and maybe 50 people in the room with dials who are deciding whether a show goes - and it's not a great way, because we're making mass entertainment.
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Frankly, I love 'Scream': I think it's one of the great scary/funny movies.
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'Super Troopers' did well but not crazy-well theatrically. But it did so well after that it - in ancillary markets - that it became impossible for us to get away from it. We'd get pulled over by cops who would thank us and then would let us go.
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'Super Troopers' benefited from the old way of watching films, the way we watched at Colgate, when you went to someone's house, looked at their DVD collection, and then just picked one.
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I started standup at age nineteen. I decided that the only way I was going to try show business as a career was if I could make total strangers laugh.
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It takes a year for us to generate a script that is ready to shoot. There are maybe 20 drafts of a script. And, each time, someone saying 'I don't really love this,' we discuss it for 15 minutes.
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It's never a matter ever, ever - are - we're never trying to gross anybody out, or ever are we trying to shock people. We're just trying to make it funny in a way that makes the audience go, 'You know, that was the first joke they thought of, and they weren't afraid to do it.'
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The smartest thing a filmmaker can do is to become a good editor.
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If I were in charge of the Olympics, I would probably try to put something for the javelin guy to aim at. Not just length, but see if you could spear something.
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As funny as we thought our script might have been, 'Super Troopers,' starring five nobodies, didn't fit the model of a good financial bet.
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You can't halt time.