Robert Ben Garant

“'The State' had never done improv. We used to go over scripts for weeks and argue about every joke. But I don't know how we would have scripted 'Reno.'”

“When I walk out of a movie that's actually good, I write emails to anybody I know who was involved with it.”

“I think our 'Reno' cops are, basically, if you made us make fun of ourselves at a party. That is what we would do. We would do those characters and not really think about it. We didn't develop the characters; everyone just put on a name tag and started improvising.”

“'Balls of Fury' was my first time directing, and that's a movie that I think parts of it are great.”

“Sometimes, when people don't like our movies, we're like, 'I'm with you.'”

“Most movies were always terrible.”

“I think with any movie, directing is more in the preparation. You just have to prepare for everything that's going to happen.”

“I would say, A, you can't really teach anyone how to write good characters, because it's something you have to teach yourself or already have innately in you as a storyteller, and, B, coming up with a good screenplay is a very, very small fraction of what it takes to be a good screenwriter.”

“If you have a writing partner that you don't share a work ethic with, it's doomed.”

“You hear a lot of writers talk like writing is therapy or some kind of magic art, but it's a business.”

“You can't teach somebody how to be a good writer.”

“Paul Rudd's a really weird, silly, silly man. He gets on 'Friends,' and he gets to show, like, one tiny little window of how truly berserk he can be.”

“We were going to do 'Reno 911!: New York, New York, Las Vegas,' which was like a 'Die Hard' set not in New York, but in the New York, New York casino in Las Vegas. We were really excited about being locked into the one casino and doing a bad action movie.”

“You need to learn that, unless your lead character is written in a way that one of the 20 movie stars want to play him, your movie will not get made.”

“You'll be in the checkout line at the supermarket, and there will be one of our movies in between the Certs and 'The National Enquirer.' That's where some of ours end up.”

“I write manically.”

“'Reno' was originally going to be a sketch show, with the cops as a transitional element.”

“There is so much that I love about all aspects of making a film or a TV show.”

“We joke a lot about how, in Hollywood, the writer is one step below the doormat. That's not self-loathing. That's true!”

“A lot of times when you're trying to do improv, everybody's doing a different style.”