I had seen movies before that that had made me laugh, but I had never seen anything even remotely close to as funny as Richard Pryor was, just standing there talking.
It's funny that people think because you don't have a movie or record out, you disappear into a frozen chamber someplace. They think you're dead when you're not in the public eye.
Every movie I do, or when I'm on the sketch comedy show, I don't really get into it until I have an outfit or something funny with my head or face or something.
I've never found kicks to the groin particularly funny, although recent work in the genre of the buddy movie suggests audience research must prove me wrong.
It's a required part of your film history to know who Woody is. His movies are so wonderful, and not just funny but so insightful about human behavior.
I moved to New York to do theater, and I got cast in a play that was funny, and then I was the funny guy. I did a movie that was funny, and then I was the funny guy.
When I watch a movie that I've been in, I'm watching it, but I usually remember what I was doing at that time, what was going on in my life.
In my whole life, when I've watched TV and movies, I've almost always felt, 'I could do that better,' and I thought everyone felt that way.
What I liked about American movies when I was a kid was that they're sort of larger than life and I think I'm still suffering from that reaction.
I like making stories and characters that people can relate to. I also like giving the audience a departure from whatever they're thinking about in their life and enjoying a show or a movie.
I don't want at the end of my life to look back at just a bunch of fictional movies I was involved in that kept taking me away from the real world.
I think that often times Hollywood panders to the cliches of small town life, specifically Southern small town life, and I think that this movie does the opposite.
'Taxi Driver' is a movie that changed my life and made me a serious actor. Scorsese and De Niro. I give credit for anything that I've ever done as an actor.
That is why it's so fun to make movies... you get to do lots of things you would never do in your normal life.
Movies are not about the weekend that they're released, and in the grand scheme of things, that's probably the most unimportant time of a film's life.
If you're going to spend two or three years of your life working on something, you've got to be making the kind of movie that discusses and influences the culture and is engaged in the world you're living in.
I mean, any movie or story that makes you accept and be grateful for something about your life is doing something right.
When you have a movie about people landing from planet Neptune, you suspend disbelief. I totally get it. But I like doing things that happen in real life.
To make a kung fu film is like a dream come true, because I'm a big fan of kung fu movies and I'm learning kung fu for a long time.
With stand-up, it doesn't matter who you are. If the audience claps because they love your movies, that clapping stops after five seconds, and then it's your job to make them laugh.
If I could rub a genie and anything could happen? Truthfully, my other love, and this is a complete 180, but I'd love to do a spy or an espionage pic, like a James Bond movie.
