After 'Melancholia' and 'On the Road,' I wanted to do a comedy. And I did so many comedies when I was younger, but if you're not consistently in those movies, people don't always think of you for them.
I definitely am a huge lover of comedy, and it's only through doing so many comedies that I've realised how much of an influence they've been on me.
We pencil-sketch our previous life so we can contrast it to the technicolor of the moment.
Some people think architecture is about the genius sketch; I don't. Great architecture is a collaboration among a lot of people over a long period of time.
I'm so hard on myself. I play these sketches in my computer for friends and they say 'Gee whiz, the vocal's beautiful.' I hear, 'It needs to be better.'
Writing is like painting. You sketch it, add colour, add depth and detail. You give it a final layer and then hang it proudly.
It's absolutely surprising to me how well 'The State' has held up as far as people liking it and having fond memories of it, considering it's a sketch show.
My first real break was when my college sketch troupe, The State, was asked to contribute pieces for a new MTV show called 'You Wrote It, You Watch It.'
If you're going to be part of a nationally televised show that airs live and do sketches that haven't even been brainstormed a week earlier, you really can't be afraid to fail.
Dysfunctional co-dependent relationships always appeal to me. I don't know exactly how it started. I start writing sketches of characters and little scene-lets, and then it builds.
During my military service, I performed a sketch in which I played a flea called Max. So when critics kept misspelling my name, I decided to change it and thought, 'Ah! Max!'
The thing about stand-up was, I was doing all this sketch and YouTube stuff where I was not being censored and I got to do my own thing, and it was really cool.
I think the great sketch shows, like 'Python' and 'Mr. Show,' they didn't stick around for very long. There's something kind of cool about that.
I steal props from 'SNL' a great deal. Almost every sketch I'm in, I try to grab something from it, so I have a storage space full of props.
Yes, but more than being a designer, I'm more of a stylist, because I don't sew and I don't sketch, but I'm good at putting things together, choosing things that are chic and glossing over the aesthetics of things.
I sketched out a rough story for them and the director said, well it's a good story but we have the go-ahead from Universal to make this script and did I want to do it. I said no, and they left.
I lived in South America when I was growing up. I spent hours sketching. I was good at drawing, and I was obsessed with fashion, but I was also obsessed with magazines.
I was fooling everyone by surrounding myself with funny people. But then I put myself out there - writing my own sketches, going on stage with nobody surrounding me - and for some reason people were still laughing.
The students that, like the wild animal being prepared for its tricks in the circus called 'life', expects only training as sketched above, will be severely disappointed: by his standards he will learn next to nothing.
What I would do is when I was younger I would draw in a sketch book something that happened in my life and then write a little something on the side about what happened or what the story.
I love doing different things where, for a little while, I can focus on standup then sketch writing, then performing, then directing a video. That, to me, is stimulating.
