Christopher Guest

“You can pick almost any field, and there's going to be weird people.”

“I don't know if I'd mastered that documentary format, but I wanted to move on from it.”

“When you hear someone talking in a restaurant or overhear someone talking on the street, there are very different patterns of conversation than you would hear in a conventional movie.”

“Mean doesn't last. Mean is over fast. Maybe this is the essence of everything, which is, to me, if there is no emotional center for what I'm doing, I have no interest in it at all.”

“There's something about that idea of looking up and hoping, and thinking, 'I'm good.' Some things, like show business, are absolutely subjective. People look at a TV show and think, 'I could do that.' And maybe they could do that. But they're not.”

“I am interested in the notion that people can become so obsessed by their world that they lose sense and awareness of how they appear to other people. They're so earnest about it. But that's true of so many things.”

“I don't make movies that make fun of anything.”

“In real life, people fumble their words. They repeat themselves and stare blankly off into space and don't listen properly to what other people are saying. I find that kind of speech fascinating but screenwriters never write dialogue like that because it doesn't look good on the page.”

“Peter Sellers is my great comedy hero.”

“What interests me most are the emotional lives of the people. If I don't have that, it's not worth doing, frankly.”

“Nothing is cut while I'm shooting. I edit between nine months and a year, and usually have around 80 hours of footage I have to get down to an 82-minute movie.”

“The truth of it is that people are not going to want to go to improvisational theater if it's not funny. You can succeed in doing all the things you're supposed to do - be truthful to scene - and if it's not funny, I'm telling you that no one's gonna care.”

“In the kind of films that I do, there is an extremely limited number of people that can improvise. The reason the ensemble continues in the movies is because those are the people that can do that kind of work. It's not just an accident those people are in the film.”

“What's interesting about Laurel and Hardy is that in most comedy teams, there's a straight man, and then there's the funny guy. And with Laurel and Hardy, they're both the funny guy.”

“I'm married to the person I fell in love with.”

“'This is Spinal Tap' was a film we felt really had to be done like that. It wouldn't have worked any other way. And it turned out to be the first time a fiction film had really been made in a documentary format. I continued to do that, obviously, because it's a fun way to work.”

“In 'Waiting for Guffman,' the character I played, the Corky character, he's very serious about what he does, and it's not meant to be mean that this is a small town and these people aren't the most talented people. They're trying the best they can. So to be mean, that would be kind of horrifying in its superficiality.”

“I read kind of serious books about fairly arcane subjects.”

“They sell these golf aids that attach to your knee and your head and are supposed to keep your swing correct. It's futile beyond belief. I've never bought any, but I could watch those ads for 24 hours straight. People with straight faces saying this thing will take strokes off your game - that's my peculiar obsession.”

“I'm not really premeditative in any way at all. I come up with an idea, hopefully for a film, and then I'm lucky enough to do the film.”