Jay Chandrasekhar Quotes
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We write and write and write until we think, 'If we have to shoot this script, we'll be happy, and it's going to be a great movie.' I meet with all the actors two weeks before, and I ask them, 'What lines don't work? What is uncomfortable for you? What jokes do you think aren't good? If you're not getting it, here's what the joke is.' You fix it.
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To me, I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, and my identity is of a suburban Chicago person. It's not like, 'Oh, I'm Indian.' I'm not. I'm American.
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We can't make movies without scripts, and there's no cost to writing a script, so my advice to newcomers is do it yourself: Write your own script, shoot your shorts, edit your shorts.
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Making films requires the creative skills you'd expect, but it also demands immense non-creative skills, like the ability to raise all that money and the savviness to work the studio's politics.
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The first thing I do in the editing room is the 'radio edit,' where you listen to the dialogue and don't even look at the visuals. The rhythm, the music of the comedy, has to work.
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There has been a stigma around letting movies be seen on home screens on the same day as theatrical screens. Universal said they were going to do it with 'Tower Heist,' but they backed off when challenged by the theater owners. I understand where the theater owners are coming from on big studio movies.
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If a joke makes our tribe laugh, we assume it will make other friend-tribes laugh.
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I remember walking into the editing room when I was a junior in college, and I watched the guy make cuts, and I didn't know what the hell was going on. He was just putting these shots together and telling the story, and it was amazing.
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I think that society is aspiring towards racial indifference, but the reality of life is not that. And so when you meet someone, you can see their race - it's right there on their face - and I feel like it's interesting.
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I have always enjoyed outlaw films such as 'Smokey and the Bandit.'
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I was pre-med for a semester, and then I got a C- in organic chemistry and was washed out of that program. Then I imagined I'd be a lawyer. I was gonna go to law school.
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Every time you jump to another format in the 'picture business,' meaning film, television, commercials, the people in the other format go, 'Ah, yeah, you made a lot of features, but you don't know how to do TV' or the commercial people go, 'Oh, you can't do 30 seconds.'
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A lot of filmmaking is just sort of slowed down by lawyers who feel they're more important than the filmmakers.
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The film you know as 'Super Troopers' is a film that almost didn't happen. The script was originally commissioned and developed by Miramax, but when it failed to get a green light, Harvey Weinstein was kind enough to give it back to us so we could make it elsewhere.
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Philosophy teaches you to think big.
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When I started, there were no Indians on television or films, except for Sir Ben Kingsley. I was an actor in high school, college, and I played leads. And when I graduated, I knew that I couldn't go to Hollywood and audition for shows or films. I could try, but where was the evidence that it was going to happen?
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The reality about shooting films is that you can shoot many jokes and decide later which one works. So it's not worth fighting about jokes.
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Look at the opening sequence of 'The Blues Brothers,' which starts at the prison. The way it was filmed, it does not look like a comedy. I thought that was great.
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I took one film class at NYU over a summer and learned the basics - you know, how to load a camera and how to light and how to edit - and I became a film editor.
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All I can do is keep my nose down and shoot the scene, shoot the scene, make it funny, make it funny, make it funny.
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We only ever write jokes that amuse us.
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Many films you see in theaters are financed through outside sources. With big films, the studio will pay, hoping to reap the reward of their big bet. But with medium and small-sized films, outside production companies and financiers often foot the bill.
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If you're not doing something or saying something in comedy, the camera is going to go somewhere else.
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My father and mother were both doctors, yes.