Adam McKay quotes

It is just funny that Americans have to contend with 2000 channels, and 60 different specific news sources, and the confusion that it creates, and the junk that we get to see is hilarious.
- Adam McKay

I'm a huge hip hop fan going way back, like, back to '83. I had my Gemini mixer listening to Run-DMC and Kurtis Blow.
- Adam McKay

All we have is our vote. But it's powerful.
- Adam McKay

I think everyone knows the news has become ridiculous. It's entertainment driven.
- Adam McKay

We’re always looking for the backbone, the central idea, and once you have that you know everything can circle around it.
- Adam McKay

We get so much information during the day that doesn’t really tell us anything.
- Adam McKay

The key is a good story. If you have a good story, you have enough emotional beats that you can hit.
- Adam McKay

Nothing is funnier than confidently doing the wrong thing.
- Adam McKay

The easiest time to be funny is during a fairly serious situation. That way you can break the ice.
- Adam McKay

Benito Mussolini created the word 'fascism.' He defined it as 'the merging of the state and the corporation.' He also said a more accurate word would be 'corporatism.' This was the definition in Webster's up until 1987 when a corporation bought Webster's and changed it to exclude any mention of corporations.
- Adam McKay

Creative freedom is a huge carrot.
- Adam McKay

All we have is our vote. But it's powerful.
- Adam McKay

You have to be able to fail with the improv. You have to not care.
- Adam McKay

The one thing for sure is, I don't ever want to waste a movie. I don't ever want to waste effort.
- Adam McKay

Most of what's tricky about comedy is the perception of it and the audience's expectation.
- Adam McKay

There's such an aggressively apolitical movement in the US that anything that smells of being political - even the term "political" is so ridiculous, when you think about it. The worst part of governing, the political side, is the grossest part, so that's what they call it. So anything that reeks of that immediately gets tuned out by 70 percent of the population.
- Adam McKay

David O. Russell is probably my favorite filmmaker. He's not only a great director, but he's also a great writer.
- Adam McKay

Everyone is sort of in their own little area counting lines and no one talks when film's not rolling. There's constantly actors coming to me back behind the monitor screaming at me, "Why did my line count drop?" It's a nasty tense environment.
- Adam McKay

I think American culture had just become so disengaged from the process of government, and we'd been so fuzzed out by our pop culture around us, that I don't think people really saw this guy for what he was.
- Adam McKay

In general, the final filter of Hollywood is for-profit. Nothing goes through unless it can make money.
- Adam McKay

When you screen it the first couple times, you're just trying to get the movie to work, trying to get the story to flow, trying to find out where your areas are where you have enough breath to laugh a little bit. So you're doing that the first two or three screenings, and then finally, you dial the movie in and it's working, and at that point, it's 50/50 as far as what's funny and what's working. Sometimes you'll put something in and it will just die so hard that it'll almost kill the movie.
- Adam McKay

There's nothing the people love more than a Federal Reserve joke.
- Adam McKay

All you can really do as director is sort of set a tone.
- Adam McKay

Old man with an old phone. That's never not funny.
- Adam McKay

For a documentary it's so important to find the characters and to find people who will give you access to film.
- Adam McKay

I got the sense that Alabama is a place where people don't want handouts and don't much care for people talking out of the side of their mouth.
- Adam McKay