Quotes from Jay Chandrasekhar

What I've found is that humans do laugh at the same things everywhere.

Growing up, I was the only Indian kid around for miles, so I ached to belong. I had a neighborhood pack of nine guys and two girls, and we hung out all the time. We played football, baseball, and broom-hockey on the iced-up lake.

The first thing I do in the editing room is the 'radio edit,' where you listen to the dialogue and don't even look at the visuals. The rhythm, the music of the comedy, has to work.

Showbiz works well when you give the audience what they want.

'Smokey and the Bandit' is tough and funny.

I took one film class at NYU over a summer and learned the basics - you know, how to load a camera and how to light and how to edit - and I became a film editor.

I think, in a film that's supposed to last an hour and a half, I think you have to really pay attention to what kind of movie you're making, what is the audience experiencing, and does this joke fit with this joke?

I think there's a pedigree that comes with being from Chicago that gives you some cache outside of L.A. and New York, where, frankly, most of show business really is.

You see any movie, and it's just a feat of human strength and perseverance. It is a brutally challenging business.

As funny as we thought our script might have been, 'Super Troopers,' starring five nobodies, didn't fit the model of a good financial bet.

I think that Broken Lizard movies typically have to be able to star five guys, so it's like, policemen, spacemen, a basketball team.

There used to be lots of legitimate independent distributors: Fox Searchlight, Miramax, Lionsgate, Warner Independent, Focus Features, Paramount Vantage, Picturehouse and Fine Line. Most of them have closed.

I was pre-med for a semester, and then I got a C- in organic chemistry and was washed out of that program. Then I imagined I'd be a lawyer. I was gonna go to law school.

I actually like and love Chevy Chase.

Philosophy teaches you to think big.

'Super Troopers' benefited from the old way of watching films, the way we watched at Colgate, when you went to someone's house, looked at their DVD collection, and then just picked one.

A lot of comedies in the 1980s and 1990s had all these colors and were so brightly lit. But John Landis had this dark style, like a Scorsese film.

With 'Puddle Cruiser,' the first 15 minutes are the weakest. When you're total unknowns and you have a weak opening, it's a real problem. At some screenings, we'd see the odd walkout before the movie even got going. But to counteract that, we'd do sketches before the show to introduce the film.

'Spinal Tap' is interesting because it created a genre of film and ended it - all in one motion. If you do a mockumentary, you are always going to be compared with that film, and you are never going to be as funny.

Look at the opening sequence of 'The Blues Brothers,' which starts at the prison. The way it was filmed, it does not look like a comedy. I thought that was great.

A lot of comedy films, there's the opinion, 'Well, if it's funny, put it in.' But I think you have to be more disciplined than that.

A lot of filmmaking is just sort of slowed down by lawyers who feel they're more important than the filmmakers.

I think romantic comedies in general are marketed towards women, and I think men are half the romance, so why not have some that are truly from a male point of view.

'Super Troopers' did well but not crazy-well theatrically. But it did so well after that it - in ancillary markets - that it became impossible for us to get away from it. We'd get pulled over by cops who would thank us and then would let us go.