Paul Feig
Paul Feig
Paul Samuel Feig /ˈfiːɡ/is an actor, film director, producer, and screenwriter. He is best known for directing the 2011 film Bridesmaids, featuring Kristen Wiig and Melissa McCarthy. Feig also directed the comedy films The Heatstarring McCarthy and Sandra Bullock, and Spywhich stars McCarthy, Jason Statham, and Jude Law...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionMovie Actor
Date of Birth17 September 1962
CityMount Clemens, MI
CountryUnited States of America
With a suit, even if you're having a nervous breakdown, you still look like you're in charge.
In my years of acting, the one thing I was never able to do convincingly was to laugh on camera. Fake-laugh.
So many of my friends have always been women growing up... I always feel slightly more comfortable around women because with guys in general there's always more of a danger zone... it's very aggressive sometimes the way guys act with each other, putting each other down and calling each other names, so I was always too sensitive for that and used to hang out with the girls. And they were always really funny to me.
I always hated high-school shows and high-school movies, because they were always about the cool kids. It was always about dating and sex, and all the popular kids, and the good-looking kids. And the nerds were super-nerdy cartoons, with tape on their glasses. I never saw 'my people' portrayed accurately.
At the end of the day the question comes, what are you doing for the world? You have to try to do something that's going to add something positive.
A lot of comedies fall apart because they just go from joke to joke, and the characters are all sort of being crazy off on their own.
I'm more of a science head, so I was like how would a guy use - if there were ghosts - technology to bring them back?
The director is the only person on the set who has seen the film. Your job as a director is to show up every day and know where everything will fit into the film.
I've always enjoyed people studying themselves in the mirror, and I also enjoy those 'walk and feel bad' shots. I like anything that isolates people and focuses them on themselves, or makes us focus on their faces as they're going through something.
The biggest thing I’ve heard for the last four months is, ‘Thanks for ruining my childhood,’
Film, television, and working with a camera is such an intimate art form that if a camera is right on you, and I've got your face filling the screen, you have to be real. If you do anything that is fake, you're not going to get away with it, because the camera is right there, and the story is being told in a very real way.
I'm not a painter who's saying, "I want people to see my work when I die; it will be this and that." That's not satisfying to me.
Whatever makes you laugh is fine, and all we can do as comedy professionals is try to steer you towards something that we think is a little better - but not put you down or just perplex you in the process.
I find that so many times when somebody tries to go back in, it sort of isn't as good and you wish they hadn't done it.