Robert B. Weide

“I feel like a lot of the guys who are trying to do political or socially relevant humor just haven't figured out who the enemy is.”

“Sit down at your computer or open your nearest mobile device and Google these words: 'Directed by.' What's the first predictive text that comes up? Martin Scorsese? Quentin Tarantino? Ingmar Bergman? Chances are the first name Google suggested was Robert B. Weide. That's me. Sort of.”

“A few months ago, a friend emailed to simply ask, 'Do you get a piece of this?' The message included a link to a site selling T-shirts emblazoned with 'Directed by Robert B. Weide.' My wife soon ordered two.”

“I'm always looking to move on to the next thing.”

“On 'Curb Your Enthusiasm,' I remember that sometime in Season 3, there was a Yiddish phrase, 'Kinahura,' and a friend of mine who was Jewish said that the closed captioning said 'Can of Hurrah.' And I thought 'Oh, God.' I never had bothered to see the transcripts but from that point on all the transcripts had to come to me and I checked them.”

“It's not writing in the traditional sense, but I've always said that the writing process continues on the set and even into the editing room.”

“I am a little wary of entering another situation where I would just be another director for hire and I've been doing this in one form or another since I was twenty-two doing documentaries for PBS and HBO.”

“I think directors who care about their work should be invested.”

“If you're watching comedy movies, go back and check out the Marx Brothers in 'Duck Soup,' or Buster Keaton in 'The General,' or Laurel and Hardy or W.C. Fields or whatever - and see what pure talent really was, so that you can see where it came from, and then you can sort of gauge it from there.”

“It took me little more than two years to complete my film, 'Woody Allen: A Documentary.' I conducted hours of filmed interviews with Woody, who put forward no ground rules about questions I could ask, or topics to avoid.”

“Somehow I got a hold of an address for Vonnegut shortly after making the Marx Brothers film. Vonnegut wrote back, saying that he had seen the Marx brothers film and loved it. That became the foundation of our friendship: old movies and comedies.”