Quotes & Jokes by Paul Reiser / page 4
It's not like some movies where you're following a bunch of different stories you can cut around. There was nowhere to cut to. It's these guys. We're not cutting back to anybody else.
I always loved comedy, but I never knew it was something you could learn to do. I always thought that some people are born comedians, just like some people are born dentists.
It felt very natural right off the bat. It was really tailor-made for him and mine was tailor-made for me, so it was easy to jump into.
Nothing would make me happier if Peter Falk would finally win his Oscar for this. Not just as the writer but as a fan and a friend. It would be so great.
I've come to realize that making it your life's work to be different than your parents is not only hard to do, it's a dumb idea. Not everything we found fault with was necessarily wrong; we were right, for example, to resent, as kids, being told when to go to bed. We'd be equally wrong, as parents, to let our kids stay up all night. To throw out all the tools of parenting just because our parents used them would be like making yourself speak English without using ten letters of the alphabet; it's hard to do.
Every time I see Peter Falk in the movie I think that would be great. We'd be fun together.
I'd never directed before and this movie's too important to me to put in the hands of some guy who has never directed. Even if it's me.
They don't see that whole pattern. Worm/death. Worm/death. I would catch on.
My wife would say my worst habit is that I'm not good at dropping subjects. If something bothers me, I'll bring it up endlessly and relentlessly. I think it's a search for clarity, but she uses different words.
In the original draft I was 27 and Peter was 55 in the script. That's not the same as a guy in his 40s and a dad in the end of his 70s. It's a different point in both our lives.
And after you've done the acting, there's a lot of places you can put your input - in the editing, in the production of it, in the rewriting of it and so on.
When you realize you would consider not having a child just so you could take an occasional snooze and be available to see Batman Retires the same weekend it comes out, you have to take a good hard look at yourself and acknowledge, "I am a shallow, shallow person."
He was born early. But he was born within a safe range of premature.
Younger kids, they understand that things aren't so perfect with their father or with their mother.