If Chevy Chase had not been an actor, he might have been a very popular guy in advertising or whatever field he would have gone into, because of his charisma.
I've been directing for 25 years almost, and I've only directed nine films in that time because I like to be careful.
I'm not a believer in the pratfall. I don't think it's funny just to have someone fall down.
I used to be married to a woman who pursued every spiritual trend with tremendous passion and dragged me along. I don't believe in anything. I'd seen mediums and readers.
I never work just to work. It's some combination of laziness and self-respect.
I never read Playboy before I started working there and stopped reading it the day I quit.
I had a lot of fun working with John Candy. We had a pretty good rapport.
I feel a big obligation to the audience, almost in a moral sense, to say something useful. If I'm going to spend a year of my life on these things, I want something that I feel that strongly about.
It's like the old rule-if you introduce a gun into the first act of a play, it's going to be used in the third act. So if you do a movie about criminals, you have to accept there's going to be Some action.
How one handles success or failure is determined by their early childhood.
I always claim that the writer has done 90 percent of the director's work.
Billy Crystal knows how to make people laugh. He's got 30 years on stage... there's no telling him what's funny.
As much as we'd like to believe that our work is great and that we're infallible, we're not. Hollywood movies are made for the audience. These are not small European art films we're making.
Acting is all about big hair and funny props... All the great actors knew it. Olivier knew it, Brando knew it.
A psychologist said to me, there are only two important questions you have to ask yourself. What do you really feel? And, what do you really want? If you can answer those two, you probably can leave your neuroses behind you.