Top 100 Adam McKay Quotes
#1. For a documentary it's so important to find the characters and to find people who will give you access to film
Adam McKay
#2. I don't think there's ever been a moment in history where that, as an artistic message, has played very well, because people in their hearts know that's terrible and a lie.
Adam McKay
#3. My theme song is 'One Tin Soldier' by Coven.
Adam McKay
#5. I have certain beliefs about how people should treat employees and how companies should be run, but I was really surprised though this process to learn that those beliefs are actually good business.
Adam McKay
#6. There are so many shoot-'em-up, action, jingoistic TV shows and movies that are made every year. I think the final line is that Hollywood is populist.
Adam McKay
#7. Friends give me a hard time about the pants I'm wearing, which are made in China. Well, how do you find the right clothes? Or the right movie studio? The right people giving you checks? Good luck doing the right thing all the time.
Adam McKay
#8. Wal-Mart is the biggest distributor of DVDs out there, but personally, I think their manufacturing policies have destroyed our economy, and they don't pay their employees enough. I have massive problems with them.
Adam McKay
#9. Every time I wrote a sketch that was in my voice, Ferrell would just do it better.
Adam McKay
#10. The corporate right fires up the religious right against gay marriage and abortion and uses their votes to push their deregulation and tax cuts for the rich. It's an old trick. The House of Saud has the same arrangement with the Mullahs in Saudi Arabia.
Adam McKay
#11. Every time a congressman or pundit says its 'class warfare' to increase taxes on the wealthy, it's a massive lie.
Adam McKay
#12. The living nightmare for a red state NASCAR driver would be a gay French driver.
Adam McKay
#13. Arnold Schwarzenegger cut teacher's salaries and parks and libraries rather than raise taxes for the many California millionaires and billionaires.
Adam McKay
#14. I think I'm better than Mamet, I would say.
Adam McKay
#15. Any time Chris Nolan wants to call me for advice, he can.
Adam McKay
#16. Having two kids, I don't get out to see stand up much anymore.
Adam McKay
#17. My wife is pretty geeky and will occasionally quote 'Anchorman' at me.
Adam McKay
#18. If you do a Western that's funny, there's no way people don't call it a spoof or a parody, even though it may not be.
Adam McKay
#19. You have a guy like Bernie Madoff literally steal $80 billion, you know, AIG steal hundreds of billions, Goldman Sachs. Crime has changed so much, and to really do a movie with, like, drug dealers or drug smugglers is kind of almost quaint at this point.
Adam McKay
#20. I have no tax breaks or corporate interests to be supported by Barack Obama.
Adam McKay
#21. I always thought George Bush was more oblivious than mean, but oblivious can quickly go to mean.
Adam McKay
#22. It's one thing to break stuff and damage people's possessions, but when you start aiming at the ideology of America, that's dangerous comedy.
Adam McKay
#23. I don't want to speak for my movies; you could say my movies are just completely silly and dumb, but in the case of 'Idiocracy' and 'Borat,' without a doubt there is a really subversive and sophisticated assault on American culture.
Adam McKay
#24. America is a country that prides itself on being able to identify a 'straight shooter' or 'the genuine article' when it comes to our leaders. As a nation, we can 'feel it in our gut' when someone is giving us a bum steer.
Adam McKay
#25. Creative freedom is a huge carrot.
Adam McKay
#26. For my money, I don't think there's been a better comedy than 'Kung Fu Hustle' in a lot of years. That movie just knocked me over.
Adam McKay
#27. You know how in every heist movie they get past the security cameras that show the hallway leading to the diamonds by jamming the screens with a fake signal of everything looking safe and quiet? Usually a guard coughs so they don't notice the blip from switching to the bogus feed.
Adam McKay
#28. The way you really stop Al-Qaeda is by stopping their funding. It's not by carpet-bombing or land invasions or anything.
Adam McKay
#29. First and foremost when you're doing comedy, you gotta be relevant and applicable to the times that you're living in. When you try and just do comedy about who is dating who and lifestyle jokes, it gets tiring after a while. It's hard to be funny in that realm.
Adam McKay
#30. Can anything good come of a backward way of thinking like judging someone based on skin color? No way.
Adam McKay
#31. Having a guy on a microphone yelling lines at you is counter to a lot of acting techniques.
Adam McKay
#32. Sony is the coolest studio. They are really amazing. I think part of it comes from they're not an American corporation. They don't work by quite the same rules. And their studio heads have a lot of autonomy.
Adam McKay
#33. The thing is, I've gotten massages to Enya. I like Enya. If you ate fantastic steaks to Celine Dion, you'd like Celine Dion.
Adam McKay
#34. All we have is our vote. But it's powerful.
Adam McKay
#35. I'm not against banking. Banking allowed our modern society to happen, it is essential. It connects the work through finance, so banking is good.
Adam McKay
#36. Governor Palin leans far closer to 'spokesperson' than representative of the people.
Adam McKay
#37. I hired a personal trainer to help me lose 25 pounds and get from obese to fat. My next step will be to get from fat to chubby.
Adam McKay
#38. I do have to give it up for Sarah Palin on one account. She is brave.
Adam McKay
#39. I'll tell you one thing ... no doubt about it, my favorite kind of comedy is talking head comedy. I mean, if it were up to me, I'd do a whole entire movie that was just around a dinner table.
Adam McKay
#40. I think when a lot of actors hear improv, they think of throwing a line in or doing a slightly different take.
Adam McKay
#41. Nowadays, the truth is, I think a lot of the newer generation of action stars usually are pretty self-deprecating and cool. I mean, Dwayne Johnson is a great example.
Adam McKay
#42. I was a huge fan of comedy in high school.
Adam McKay
#43. When the movie starts playing on TV and DVD, that's when you really see what the movie is.
Adam McKay
#44. I hired Tina Fey for 'SNL,' which was certainly a good match. She took off right away there.
Adam McKay
#45. As for movies, what's great about comedy is that if your movie gets laughs and makes money, you have freedom.
Adam McKay
#46. David O. Russell is probably my favorite filmmaker. He's not only a great director, but he's also a great writer.
Adam McKay
#47. Michael Lewis has the amazing ability to take complex formulas and concepts and turn them into page-turners.
Adam McKay
#48. 'Firewall' seems both scary and protective at the same time. And how often does that happen within one word besides 'military' and 'government?'
Adam McKay
#51. Nothing heightens chaos more than a berserk wild animal right in the middle.
Adam McKay
#52. Dave Herman as Michael Bolton is one of my favorite performances ever.
Adam McKay
#53. There's nothing more fun than making fun of what's sacred.
Adam McKay
#54. In the past, in the '60s and '70s, genres were much more segmented. You had action guys who were deadly serious about it, and I think you had comics that were comics.
Adam McKay
#55. McCain is the kid who was really cool in middle school but never got high school game and people are sick of him acting like he's still popular.
Adam McKay
#56. Things I used to get in trouble for writing at 'SNL,' suddenly other people like it.
Adam McKay
#57. The key is a good story. If you have a good story, you have enough emotional beats that you can hit.
Adam McKay
#58. I gotta say - if I clicked on a movie interview, and the first part was all about Walt Whitman, I'd love that article.
Adam McKay
#59. As far as how much you listen to the audience, you listen to them when they really hate something.
Adam McKay
#60. The truth is, there's an information blockade in America, and it must be broken. In order to find crucial facts, numbers and outside perspectives, a person must spend an hour searching and cross-searching on the computer.
Adam McKay
#61. Celebrities and 'famous' people are just regular folks. I know, it's a shocking and potentially dangerous statement.
Adam McKay
#62. In general, the final filter of Hollywood is for-profit. Nothing goes through unless it can make money.
Adam McKay
#63. George W. Bush was a silver spoon dolt with no record to speak of other than bankruptcy and selling tropical plants, and we let him sail into the White House, but Barack talks about religious fundamentalism and guns being prevalent in poor areas, and we roast him for weeks?
Adam McKay
#64. I guess HBO did a giant 'War in the Pacific' mini-series that cost, like, a fortune, and there was a little moment where they literally had no money. And even though the show had become kind of a cult hit, there was an issue of whether they could actually afford to do it.
Adam McKay
#65. The 'Police Academy' stuff was all hyper-slapsticky.
Adam McKay
#66. A lot of shorts spend too much time setting up the idea; sometimes they meander.
Adam McKay
#67. Actually, 'Wayne's World 2' I kind of liked. I think 'Wayne's World 2' does have some creative things in it, some ideas in it.
Adam McKay
#68. We get so much information during the day that doesn't really tell us anything.
Adam McKay
#69. Blanket cynicism toward government has always existed.
Adam McKay
#70. Obama is the new kid with the weird name who people just sense is a little classier than his surroundings. He moved from a private school where he was class president and is now at the giant public high school with the metal detectors and the smoking lounge.
Adam McKay
#71. Hollywood is for-profit, is what Hollywood is. All the studios are owned by big, megacorporations that are the furthest thing from liberal you can possibly imagine.
Adam McKay
#72. If you're making comedies, they have to have a fun and a rhythm to them.
Adam McKay
#73. I think there's a tendency to think geeks and nerds are just sweet guys that were picked on, but that hasn't been my experience. I'm certainly not like that, in a lot of ways.
Adam McKay
#74. There's always way less improv than people think. The truth is something like 15 percent.
Adam McKay
#75. In general foreign invested companies who come to America to start a company, to open a manufacturing business or whatnot, they actually provide much higher wages than American companies.
Adam McKay
#76. It so happens that America, according to all the polls that are out there, is pretty progressive. So you're not going to see messages that support Ayn Randian individualism at the cost of the whole, because most people don't agree with that.
Adam McKay
#77. Billions have been spent for one purpose and one purpose only: to obscure and distract from the fact that Mitt Romney is backing the identical agenda George W. Bush did.
Adam McKay
#78. That's always the trick with the sequels, is how much do you repeat from the first one. Because we all get bummed out when you go see a sequel and it's beat for beat.
Adam McKay
#79. Word of mouth and the Internet are the only press we have left.
Adam McKay
#80. The crush of lobbyists on Washington and purchase of the media by corporations has created a big business-run government and a worthless press leaving Americans screwed and ill-informed.
Adam McKay
#81. Obamacare is a private mandate that will drive billions to the insurance industry, much like the auto insurance mandate. Hardly socialism. In fact, it was a Republican plan to begin with.
Adam McKay
#82. The hardest thing in the world to do is to have someone in a seat in a theater laughing so hard that they're making weird sounds.
Adam McKay
#83. It's time Hawaii answer doubters and produce documents proving that it is a state. What are they hiding? And why haven't we seen these documents?
Adam McKay
#84. There are many aspects to directing that have a romantic place in people's minds.
Adam McKay
#85. I'm just a giant film fan, so I love action movies out of all kinds of movies. As a film geek, it's amazing to be able to shoot this stuff.
Adam McKay
#86. First off, no one award-wise ever rewards comedy, which is ... whatever. I don't care about that.
Adam McKay
#87. I am actually talking about possibly adapting 'The Boys,' by Garth Ennis, which would not be a comedy, but an action movie with comedy elements to it.
Adam McKay
#88. When you do comedy, you get impervious to good and bad reviews.
Adam McKay
#89. Truth is like poetry.
And most people fucking hate poetry.
Adam McKay
#90. The only way that Hollywood ever skews toward liberal is because part of what we make out of Hollywood involves writers, actors, directors, musicians, set designers, and photographers. In general, people like that are going to be more progressive, more open minded, a little more altruistic.
Adam McKay
#91. I love 'The Wire;' that's my favorite show, so I'll watch that.
Adam McKay
#92. 'Step Brothers 2' would have been fun, there's no doubt about it. Maybe someday. Does that idea age? I don't know. It all depends on how the movie ages.
Adam McKay
#93. You can't really do a big character in an action film; you're already suspending your disbelief in the action, then to suspend your disbelief in the character is too much.
Adam McKay
#94. Basically, we used to have a rule at 'Saturday Night Live' that you're not allowed to bring up 'The Simpsons' at the rewrite table, because 'The Simpsons' has done every joke there is. Every week there would be guys going, 'The Simpsons did that.' I go, 'C'mon.' And 'South Park,' too.
Adam McKay
#95. A dry stretch of commentary in the middle of an 'Anchorman' movie would have been a terrible thing.
Adam McKay
#96. 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
#97. There's nothing more fun to me than new characters and a new world.
Adam McKay
#98. Other than Green Day, we haven't had a lot of protest music over the past few decades.
Adam McKay
#99. I was shocked when 'The Hobbit' ended where it ended. I wasn't paying attention to what they were doing; I didn't know they had another movie, and I couldn't believe it was when the dragon came out.
Adam McKay
#100. If you look at 'Avatar,' could you imagine if you did 'Avatar' for 50 million dollars? It would be ridiculous! You would almost be getting laughs from the audience, unless you got a real indie director to do something incredibly stylised.
Adam McKay
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