Nicholas Stoller
Nicholas Stoller
Nicholas Stolleris an English–American filmmaker. He is known mainly for directing the 2008 comedy Forgetting Sarah Marshall, its 2010 spin-off/sequel, Get Him to the Greek, and co-writing and executive producing The Muppets and Muppets Most Wanted...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionDirector
Date of Birth19 March 1976
trying comedy rich
I love the romantic comedy genre. It's a genre rich with many of the best movies ever made and I try to treat it with the respect that Shakespeare treated it with.
fun fighting two
Everyone forgets that what's fun about a romantic comedy is how these two people are going to fight with each other and how's that going to be funny.
digital
I like digital because you can shoot for longer.
running talking two
And also, I'm most comfortable with like two people just sitting and talking about their feeling, you know, in a room with like two cameras and that's it. And I wanted to do something where there was like action and running and you know crowd scenes and big set pieces and certainly did a lot of that, so yeah.
crazy reading writing
The Lampoon was definitely quite formative. You know there's a crazy like kind of network of comedy writers from The Lampoon that are, that kind of you know like Seinfeld and The Simpsons and a lot of shows kind of had a lot of kind of Lampoon writers and so that was very formative. I mean, to me I got interested in comedy writing at an early like reading like Dave Barry.
people animation animated
All movies are inherently collaborative, and animation even more so. There are hundreds and hundreds of people involved with an animated movie.
children wife easy
For my wife and I, our first child was really easy to have, but our second one was really hard to have. We had to go to a lot of fertility clinics and do that whole thing.
writing thinking direct
When I write something, it's usually 'cause I think it's funny or I have a way in, but when I direct something, I really need to be close to it.
writing creative cracks
When I just write something, it's usually because I love it, I love the material, but I feel like I really need a creative partner to crack it. And I certainly need and have a lot of creative partners as a director.
wise worst
The worst thing you can do is animate something, and then throw it out because it doesn't work, story wise.
direct
All of the things I've directed, I'm really emotionally close to. That's why I choose to direct them and spend years on them.
editing watches want
And I watch all the dailies and I grade the jokes or the moments, you know, on a scale from... so I know exactly what we have. And so I can then go into the editing room and be like "I want you to do this moment, this moment, this joke, that joke. I'd like to see 3 versions."
editors giving perspective
Every day is still exciting. I have like a very good system worked out with my editor. Some directors are in there every day, sitting there in the room with the editor. I lose perspective incredibly quickly, and so what I do is I watch...I come in the room and give very specific notes and then I go back to my house or in my office and I watch the dailies.
laughter writing phones
And then afterwards I worked in advertising for a year which taught me about writing even when you don't want to (laughter) because there's never a moment that you want to write about an Erickson cell phone but you have to. And that's really important you know obviously for the...like if you really want to write, you have to write every day no matter how you feel or you know. And then, yeah, and then I ended up working in TV and then from TV into movies and then directing, so.