Adam McKay Quotations | Page 2

If you're making comedies, they have to have a fun and a rhythm to them.

It's one thing to break stuff and damage people's possessions, but when you start aiming at the ideology of America, that's dangerous comedy.

Matt Braunger really makes me laugh; I like that guy a lot.

Michael Lewis has the amazing ability to take complex formulas and concepts and turn them into page-turners.

Nothing heightens chaos more than a berserk wild animal right in the middle.

Wal-Mart is the biggest distributor of DVDs out there, but personally, I think their manufacturing policies have destroyed our economy, and they don't pay their employees enough. I have massive problems with them.

The hardest thing in the world to do is to have someone in a seat in a theater laughing so hard that they're making weird sounds.

The key is a good story. If you have a good story, you have enough emotional beats that you can hit.

The thing is, I've gotten massages to Enya. I like Enya. If you ate fantastic steaks to Celine Dion, you'd like Celine Dion.

There's nothing more fun than making fun of what's sacred.

There's nothing more fun to me than new characters and a new world.

Things I used to get in trouble for writing at 'SNL,' suddenly other people like it.

When the movie starts playing on TV and DVD, that's when you really see what the movie is.

You need the audience to go on the ride with you. You can't just isolate them.

You think of movies like 'Midnight Run' and '48 Hours', those are great movies, especially 'Midnight Run.'

You're not a slave to those test audiences.

I don't want to speak for my movies; you could say my movies are just completely silly and dumb, but in the case of 'Idiocracy' and 'Borat,' without a doubt there is a really subversive and sophisticated assault on American culture.

As far as what makes a viral video, then it's gotta be something that you've either never seen before, a fresh piece of comedy, or something that relates to something topical.

I am actually talking about possibly adapting 'The Boys,' by Garth Ennis, which would not be a comedy, but an action movie with comedy elements to it.

I was shocked when 'The Hobbit' ended where it ended. I wasn't paying attention to what they were doing; I didn't know they had another movie, and I couldn't believe it was when the dragon came out.

If you go back and watch 'The French Connection,' it's been cannibalized so many times. There are certain movies like that, where you see the original and think, 'This isn't so great.' And the reason it isn't so great is because everyone has copied it.

If you look at 'Avatar,' could you imagine if you did 'Avatar' for 50 million dollars? It would be ridiculous! You would almost be getting laughs from the audience, unless you got a real indie director to do something incredibly stylised.

In the past, in the '60s and '70s, genres were much more segmented. You had action guys who were deadly serious about it, and I think you had comics that were comics.

Basically, we used to have a rule at 'Saturday Night Live' that you're not allowed to bring up 'The Simpsons' at the rewrite table, because 'The Simpsons' has done every joke there is. Every week there would be guys going, 'The Simpsons did that.' I go, 'C'mon.' And 'South Park,' too.

Billions have been spent for one purpose and one purpose only: to obscure and distract from the fact that Mitt Romney is backing the identical agenda George W. Bush did.

For some reason, people with comedy, any time they can detect a pattern, it kind of freaks them out. 'Those guys are always together!' Yeah, they're a comedy team. Anything they can recognize as a pattern they think is a hole.

It's just funny that Americans have to contend with 2000 channels, and 60 different specific news sources, and the confusion that it creates, and the junk that we get to see is hilarious.

It's Will Ferrell, he does Will Ferrell movies. But if you really look at it, he tries to do something different with each one, whether it's an action cop movie like 'The Other Guys' or doing 'Talladega Nights' going into red state America or 'Casa de Mi Padre' or 'Stranger Than Fiction,' which is more of a drama.

Nothing is more enjoyable for me than when I'm watching a movie or a TV show and there's that sense that anything can happen. It is the most fun feeling in the world.

'Step Brothers 2' would have been fun, there's no doubt about it. Maybe someday. Does that idea age? I don't know. It all depends on how the movie ages.

That's always the trick with the sequels, is how much do you repeat from the first one. Because we all get bummed out when you go see a sequel and it's beat for beat.

The truth is, there's an information blockade in America, and it must be broken. In order to find crucial facts, numbers and outside perspectives, a person must spend an hour searching and cross-searching on the computer.

Voting for Romney after the train wreck of that was the eight years of W. Bush is like losing your pay check playing a rigged game of three-card monte and then playing the same game again a week later 'cause the cards are a different color.

When I was at 'SNL,' I would constantly get in arguments, 'Why aren't we more political? We're not going after Bush.' Then look what happened - that Sarah Palin season, they were on fire. It was about something.

Creative freedom is a huge carrot.

We're always looking for the backbone, the central idea, and once you have that you know everything can circle around it.

Hollywood has to appeal to the broadest audience, and when it comes to most social and economic issues, America is progressive. Because of that, the messages that are in Hollywood movies tend to be, for instance, pro-environment.

It so happens that America, according to all the polls that are out there, is pretty progressive. So you're not going to see messages that support Ayn Randian individualism at the cost of the whole, because most people don't agree with that.

You could feel America starting to ease up a little bit on racism, against blacks in certain pockets, and then suddenly The Cosby Show bubbled up and it was the right time for it.

I think that the job of art and culture is to jump on that time and realize that it's there and to push it just a little bit faster.

I grew up with a single mom who was a waitress. We were on food stamps. My mom then got Pell Grants, put herself through college to get a degree to get a better job. Because we were broke, I then had to go to a state school. I went to Temple University, and had to get loans. So I grew up in a world where I saw the government helping individuals pull themselves up, and saw it work very successfully.

I think American culture had just become so disengaged from the process of government, and we'd been so fuzzed out by our pop culture around us, that I don't think people really saw this guy for what he was.

Blanket cynicism toward government has always existed.

Animals talking are very rarely funny. But animals behaving as animals - always funny.

Old man with an old phone. That's never not funny.

As for movies, what's great about comedy is that if your movie gets laughs and makes money, you have freedom.

Every time I wrote a sketch that was in my voice, Ferrell would just do it better.

I always give myself a little part in every movie.

There's always way less improv than people think. The truth is something like 15 percent.

There are so many shoot-'em-up, action, jingoistic TV shows and movies that are made every year. I think the final line is that Hollywood is populist.

In general, the final filter of Hollywood is for-profit. Nothing goes through unless it can make money.

I don't think there's ever been a moment in history where that, as an artistic message, has played very well, because people in their hearts know that's terrible and a lie.

Everyone is sort of in their own little area counting lines and no one talks when film's not rolling. There's constantly actors coming to me back behind the monitor screaming at me, "Why did my line count drop?" It's a nasty tense environment.

I'm just a giant film fan, so I love action movies out of all kinds of movies. As a film geek, it's amazing to be able to shoot this stuff.

Normally when it hits two and a half, three hours, the audience gets exhausted and start yawning.

I could see how people get addicted to animation, and I understand why it's so great for comedy. You can do whatever you want and it just happens.

For a documentary it's so important to find the characters and to find people who will give you access to film

In general foreign invested companies who come to America to start a company, to open a manufacturing business or whatnot, they actually provide much higher wages than American companies.

I have certain beliefs about how people should treat employees and how companies should be run, but I was really surprised though this process to learn that those beliefs are actually good business.

We get so much information during the day that doesn't really tell us anything.

The one thing for sure is, I don't ever want to waste a movie. I don't ever want to waste effort.

I would never call myself cultural elite, but you might be cultural elite.

I'm not against banking. Banking allowed our modern society to happen, it is essential. It connects the work through finance, so banking is good.

Hollywood is for-profit, is what Hollywood is. All the studios are owned by big, megacorporations that are the furthest thing from liberal you can possibly imagine.

The only way that Hollywood ever skews toward liberal is because part of what we make out of Hollywood involves writers, actors, directors, musicians, set designers, and photographers. In general, people like that are going to be more progressive, more open minded, a little more altruistic.

I've gotten like five laughs in movies, just off guy hugs.

You have a guy like Bernie Madoff literally steal $80 billion, you know, AIG steal hundreds of billions, Goldman Sachs. Crime has changed so much, and to really do a movie with, like, drug dealers or drug smugglers is kind of almost quaint at this point.