Nicholas Stoller Quotes
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It's all in L.A. There might be some location shooting as well. I think it's pretty short. I heard it was like six to eight weeks, which is pretty short. But you don't have to do makeup or anything. There's no hair, there's no makeup, there's like one trailer for Jason and one for the actors who do cameos. It's quick. So that's what they're saying. I don't know if that will change.
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And I watch all the dailies and I grade the jokes or the moments, you know, on a scale from... so I know exactly what we have. And so I can then go into the editing room and be like "I want you to do this moment, this moment, this joke, that joke. I'd like to see 3 versions."
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All movies are inherently collaborative, and animation even more so. There are hundreds and hundreds of people involved with an animated movie.
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I feel very creatively satisfied and lucky that I get to write for other people, but for something I direct, it has to be something I completely understand every facet of.
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We have tons of live performances that we're putting on there. We have music videos. There's a music video for the song called I Am Jesus what is one of the funniest music videos, like we just could not find a place for it in the movie, but it's like crazy funny. And we have the whole video.
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Yeah, it's an origin story. But you very quickly get into the origin and then it's off to the races. It is an origin story, certainly, but it's not like the movie ends and somebody stretches. It happens pretty quickly and I'm not sure how much I'm allowed to say about it, but I think when people see that first hint, they'll be pretty excited about it.
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Yeah, because we wanted to go back to the original tone. It's one of the original movies like The Muppet Movie, Muppets Take Manhattan, The Great Muppet Caper. Those kinds of movies. So that was really important that we hit that tone and those have a lot of cameos in them and so Jason and I started asking people and everyone we asked just wants to do it.
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Every day is still exciting. I have like a very good system worked out with my editor. Some directors are in there every day, sitting there in the room with the editor. I lose perspective incredibly quickly, and so what I do is I watch...I come in the room and give very specific notes and then I go back to my house or in my office and I watch the dailies.
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Like everyone is either, "I grew up with it," or "I loved it," or loved them now. And when you watch The Muppet Movie now, it is so current. It's like The Simpsons before The Simpsons. It's not as cynical as The Simpsons would be but it's self-aware and there are a billion jokes, it breaks the fourth wall every five minutes, it's astounding, it's awesome. It's very exciting to be a part of that.
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I remember like that scene with Pharrell where they're at the music video shoot, we have this on camera actually, Pharrell's confused because we weren't doing the script. We were doing all this improv and then Diddy says to him... Pharrell's like I don't understand what's going on and Diddy goes, "We do a lot of improv". (laughter) I remember being we just made him into a comedy nerd. We somehow turned Sean Combs into a comedy nerd, so.
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Maybe I'm just not that humble but our script is awesome. Like Jason is so into the Muppets and such a fan. I'm such a fan of Muppets.
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And there's so much extra material. I mean, I've certainly read as you asked about do I read reviews and stuff, like people are like none of the jokes in the trailers are like in the movie. And it's like and we have whole sequences and scenes that weren't in the movie.
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Because also, sometimes things that are really funny on the day, when you look at them in post can feel too broad, you know? Sometimes not, but it's kind of weird how that can change.
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When I was writing the script I thought he is this guy. I really hoped...I kept imagining him as that guy. And then he came in to audition and I was really nervous because I really wanted him to do Greek, you know? And he...I didn't know who else I could cast. And he was amazing in the audition. Really funny.
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I'm like really bad at like remembering all these things, but basically we finished...we wrapped in August and we locked in February. It was like we did our first friends and family screening I would say 8-weeks after we locked...after we wrapped or 8-weeks after we wrapped.
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They literally have what they would call "a four-quadrant" movie that they could just release at any moment. Parents want to go there, kids want to go there, hipsters want to go there. It's like everyone will want to see it.
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It's interesting to have the awkward moments play out, and the real human interactions. The more you cut that down, you lose the joke, which is that this is painful and hard.
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It won't be that expensive, the script is fun, the guys just love this thing, and with all of that, the world is just ready for the Muppets again. It's strange that there hasn't been one for so long. I think there were a lot of political reasons for why that was the case but it's just exciting that now it's going to happen.
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A big part of being in a relationship or marriage or whatever is you have to eventually compromise. Your life doesn't end up exactly the way you think it's going to, and if it's the right relationship, you might have to compromise what you're doing professionally.
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I remember reading Dave Barry for the first time and being like oh my God I can't believe you can do this. Watching Mel Brooks and Monty Python and SNL and all that stuff really informed me as a writer and then at high school I started a satire magazine and the college like The Lampoon really introduced me to like you know a lot of very like-minded people who really wanted to like comedy was the center of their lives.
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For my wife and I, our first child was really easy to have, but our second one was really hard to have. We had to go to a lot of fertility clinics and do that whole thing.
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The Lampoon was definitely quite formative. You know there's a crazy like kind of network of comedy writers from The Lampoon that are, that kind of you know like Seinfeld and The Simpsons and a lot of shows kind of had a lot of kind of Lampoon writers and so that was very formative. I mean, to me I got interested in comedy writing at an early like reading like Dave Barry.
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When I just write something, it's usually because I love it, I love the material, but I feel like I really need a creative partner to crack it. And I certainly need and have a lot of creative partners as a director.
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And then afterwards I worked in advertising for a year which taught me about writing even when you don't want to (laughter) because there's never a moment that you want to write about an Erickson cell phone but you have to. And that's really important you know obviously for the...like if you really want to write, you have to write every day no matter how you feel or you know. And then, yeah, and then I ended up working in TV and then from TV into movies and then directing, so.