Words matter. These are the best Robert Ben Garant Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
If a movie has three decent scenes and a decent character, I think, ‘OK, at least they got that guy right.’
Paul Rudd’s a really weird, silly, silly man. He gets on ‘Friends,’ and he gets to show, like, one tiny little window of how truly berserk he can be.
There were guys in ‘The State’ who would take one script and rewrite it and rewrite it and rewrite it and fight for it for a whole season, and after a couple of seasons, you realized that doesn’t work. You have to just be willing to throw something away, no matter how good it is, and write a better joke.
If one real working screenwriter had visited us in college and just said, ‘This is what my day is like,’ it would have been really helpful.
What happens is, you write a spec, people get it, they see your writing, they see you’re good, they bring you into their office, and they say, ‘Boy, that spec was really good – we’ll never make that in a million years. We have rights to the board game of Monopoly. What do you think about a Monopoly movie?’
You can’t teach somebody how to be a good writer.
‘Reno 911: Miami!’ is a terrible, terrible title, and all the reviews – good and mostly bad – nobody pointed out how stupid a title that was. But you can hardly come up with a sentence that’s more awkward.
I never really saw ‘The Kids in the Hall’ until after we started ‘The State.’
In cop shows, the police don’t get to rag on each other and rag on their commander and rag on the person they just pulled over. That was all ‘Reno’ was, and I think that’s all cops do 90 percent of their day.
I think with any movie, directing is more in the preparation. You just have to prepare for everything that’s going to happen.
I write manically.
You need to learn that, unless your lead character is written in a way that one of the 20 movie stars want to play him, your movie will not get made.
Movies are very, very good to me; What do I need TV for?
There’s a studio formula of making a movie that Betty White fans and Ice Cube fans are going to love, so it’s a really broad brush.
‘Reno’ was originally going to be a sketch show, with the cops as a transitional element.
I don’t think people realize how many scripts you write that go nowhere.
I would say, A, you can’t really teach anyone how to write good characters, because it’s something you have to teach yourself or already have innately in you as a storyteller, and, B, coming up with a good screenplay is a very, very small fraction of what it takes to be a good screenwriter.
You hear a lot of writers talk like writing is therapy or some kind of magic art, but it’s a business.
My college years are a blur.
‘Balls of Fury’ was my first time directing, and that’s a movie that I think parts of it are great.
When I walk out of a movie that’s actually good, I write emails to anybody I know who was involved with it.
L.A. is like an oil rig. It’s not pretty. It’s awful. The air is bad, the view is bad, the people are bad.
The ‘Reno’ movie is very solid. ‘Balls of Fury’ I’m pretty disappointed in – I blame myself. People hate both of those movies equally.
You write a spec, and you pour your heart and soul and life into a spec, and you think that spec is the movie that’s going to sell and get made… I’ve never heard of anybody that happened to.
Sometimes when you do a whole script, you hand it off, and it gets rewritten by a bunch of people, and people don’t really get that much of a sense of how funny you can be.
We joke a lot about how, in Hollywood, the writer is one step below the doormat. That’s not self-loathing. That’s true!
I go into movies I hate, and that movie will make $500 million.
We’re writing movies that people buy without thinking about it.
The good thing about being a writer is that you don’t need anything except for a laptop. You can really do your own work, and if you’re not manically compelled to write all the time before you do it professionally, it’s probably not a business for you, anyway.
Telltale signs that your movie is going to go bad is, one, the producer of the movie flees the country.
Not a lot of movies have their own feel.
It’s always hard to watch bad actors improv on your skit.
We had a great run on ‘Reno’ – 87 episodes and a movie. Not too shabby.
If you have a writing partner that you don’t share a work ethic with, it’s doomed.
Sometimes, when people don’t like our movies, we’re like, ‘I’m with you.’
Most movies were always terrible.
A lot of times when you’re trying to do improv, everybody’s doing a different style.
I think our ‘Reno’ cops are, basically, if you made us make fun of ourselves at a party. That is what we would do. We would do those characters and not really think about it. We didn’t develop the characters; everyone just put on a name tag and started improvising.
When we were doing ‘Viva Variety,’ we knew, ‘Boy, this really cracks us up, but this is not for everybody. This is a little weird.’
We were going to do ‘Reno 911!: New York, New York, Las Vegas,’ which was like a ‘Die Hard’ set not in New York, but in the New York, New York casino in Las Vegas. We were really excited about being locked into the one casino and doing a bad action movie.
