I was very young, and I kind of decided I wanted to do comedy. My parents were musicians, so we traveled on a tour bus. You're in a different town every night; as a kid, you're trying to make friends fast. You try to be funny.
For people who have done comedy after a certain point in time, I think there's a base level of, 'O.K., I think I'm decently funny.' But unless you just have some massive ego, I really think you're still fighting against that.
I love romantic comedies. They're for me the easiest thing to do and the most natural to do. There's nothing natural about holding an uzi hanging out of a moving van shooting at people. That's not second nature to me, thank God.
I find painting a much slower process than comedy, where you can go a mile a minute verbally and hope to God that some of the people out there understand you. I don't paint every day. I'm not that motivated.
I just made the decision that I was going to try comedy, and if didn't work, then I knew it didn't work. Then I would go back and do whatever. But at least I wouldn't torture myself the rest of my life, wondering whatever would have happened.
I was, and am, a frustrated filmmaker and film student, and my passion and love for movies was so broad that, in the earlier part of my career, I stumbled into doing 'Sports Night' and was a comedy director.
I don't love comedy but I can watch someone who's kind of interesting forever. I think a waitress who's having a bad day is a lot more fun than Robin Williams doing forty minutes of material.
I would love to work with Sir Anthony Hopkins. How and why that would happen in a comedy I'm not sure - why he would be dragged over to my side, or I'd be be dragged over to his side.
I've always been sort of addicted to genre-jumping. I've never been in the mood to do the same thing I did last time. Hence, me going from 'Big Love' to romantic comedy, to period film... I can't sit still.
A comedy can actually get funnier and funnier. Even though you know the joke, you enjoy it so much, it's the facial expression, you laugh. The laugh doesn't wear off. It could be with you for thirty years.
There is no essential difference between the material of comedy and tragedy. All depends on the point of view of the dramatist, which, by clever emphasis, he tries to make the point of view of his audience.
Comedy has to be so much cleaner than drama. You can't layer it in the way you can a dramatic performance. Which is why it's more difficult than drama - you don't have so many tricks.
In 'Pictures from an Institution,' Randall Jarrell was able to transcend the academic novel by simply ignoring it, writing a comedy with no plot at all beyond his own pleasure in language and humanity itself.
The first comedy screenplay that I wrote was Animal House and I always thought I could and should be a director but no one was about to give me that opportunity on Animal House.
I think my comedy, the put-downs I do to hecklers, are the accumulated bitterness of years of people feeling that it's perfectly acceptable to make a comment on your appearance when they don't even know you.
I keep my stand-up comedy notes in a pile on my desk. I don't organize my act. I keep myself in a state of confusion. It stresses me out, but I prefer creative chaos.
I did a couple comedies to balance myself as an actor and balance how audiences see Donnie Yen as an actor, and I would even say as a celebrity or icon, to some fans. I want to show that I'm not Terminator.
You can find pictures anywhere. It's simply a matter of noticing things and organizing them. You just have to care about what's around you and have a concern with humanity and the human comedy.
Golf was my first glimpse of comedy. I was a caddy when I was a kid. I was on the golf course rather than being in lessons, but I can play better now than I could then.
I got involved in improv comedy. It settled me down when I was getting wild. I was sort of an evil teenager smashing up my cars and drinking and driving, let's just say, a lot.
Only recently - about five minutes ago, relative to the long-running human comedy - have parents been driving themselves to distraction by taking too seriously the idea that 'as the twig is bent the tree's inclined.'
