Jay Chandrasekhar

“A lot of filmmaking is just sort of slowed down by lawyers who feel they're more important than the filmmakers.”

“We write and write and write until we think, 'If we have to shoot this script, we'll be happy, and it's going to be a great movie.' I meet with all the actors two weeks before, and I ask them, 'What lines don't work? What is uncomfortable for you? What jokes do you think aren't good? If you're not getting it, here's what the joke is.' You fix it.”

“I always feel like any criminal who doesn't have a mask on is dumb: particularly the ones who don't realize that all mini-marts have cameras. I find that so hilarious. Or bank robbers without a mask. You're like, 'Have you seen no movies?'”

“I think that society is aspiring towards racial indifference, but the reality of life is not that. And so when you meet someone, you can see their race - it's right there on their face - and I feel like it's interesting.”

“I've written close to 20 screenplays and 100 sketches - I know exactly how to do them. They're judged by set criteria that I know.”

“I remember walking into the editing room when I was a junior in college, and I watched the guy make cuts, and I didn't know what the hell was going on. He was just putting these shots together and telling the story, and it was amazing.”

“Making films requires the creative skills you'd expect, but it also demands immense non-creative skills, like the ability to raise all that money and the savviness to work the studio's politics.”

“I actually like and love Chevy Chase.”

“'Super Troopers' did well but not crazy-well theatrically. But it did so well after that it - in ancillary markets - that it became impossible for us to get away from it. We'd get pulled over by cops who would thank us and then would let us go.”

“The smartest thing a filmmaker can do is to become a good editor.”

“If I had to be in the Olympics, I suppose I would do the javelin throw.”

“People always ask us, 'Hey, is there going to be a 'Beerfest 2'?' I don't know if I have another beer joke in me.”

“We shot 'Super Troopers' on the side of the road in the summer in Poughkeepsie.”

“With 'Puddle Cruiser,' the first 15 minutes are the weakest. When you're total unknowns and you have a weak opening, it's a real problem. At some screenings, we'd see the odd walkout before the movie even got going. But to counteract that, we'd do sketches before the show to introduce the film.”

“Look at the opening sequence of 'The Blues Brothers,' which starts at the prison. The way it was filmed, it does not look like a comedy. I thought that was great.”

“In the summer of 2000, four college friends and I grew mustaches, bought highway patrol uniforms, and shot a $1.2 million budgeted independent film called 'Super Troopers.'”

“History is ultimately storytelling. I think the more stories you write in life - and I've written a lot of screenplays, a lot of short stories - you realize it's your interpretation of events that people read, and they absorb that.”

“A lot of comedy films, there's the opinion, 'Well, if it's funny, put it in.' But I think you have to be more disciplined than that.”

“Filmmaking, at the end of the day, is really - in addition to the story and all of the equipment and the actors, it's really about time management. And so the smartest filmmakers are the ones who sort of pre-visualize the film in their head and are literally shooting the shots they need to cut the story together.”

“As funny as we thought our script might have been, 'Super Troopers,' starring five nobodies, didn't fit the model of a good financial bet.”