Quotes from Jay Chandrasekhar

A lot of the original people on 'SNL' came through Chicago - and Toronto, I'm sure - but Chicago was the center of it all. When I was there, Chris Farley - I knew him; we hung out and stuff - he went off to 'Saturday Night Live,' it was like, 'It's possible to be from here and make it.'

Making films requires the creative skills you'd expect, but it also demands immense non-creative skills, like the ability to raise all that money and the savviness to work the studio's politics.

Often, when you're in some of these writing rooms for... and the most restrictive is network television, right? They say, 'Wow, that's a great joke, but we can't do that. Okay, let's try the second joke. Oh, you can't do that one. But the third joke you can do,' and hopefully it will be great, but it will remind people of what the joke really was.

When Broken Lizard writes a movie, we reject everything that doesn't have five guys as leads, so it needs to be cops or a basketball team; that's what we can do.

I think that society is aspiring towards racial indifference, but the reality of life is not that. And so when you meet someone, you can see their race - it's right there on their face - and I feel like it's interesting.

That movie - 'Airplane!' - it influenced so many of us.

Integrity matters. What our fans think matters.

When I started, there were no Indians on television or films, except for Sir Ben Kingsley. I was an actor in high school, college, and I played leads. And when I graduated, I knew that I couldn't go to Hollywood and audition for shows or films. I could try, but where was the evidence that it was going to happen?

There was a Burger King in Hamilton, N.Y., where Colgate is, that had three sizes: Small, Medium, and Liter. I would go in there and order a large. And they'd say, 'We don't have large; we have liters.' So they'd make us order liters of cola, which I found to be just anti-American.

I've written close to 20 screenplays and 100 sketches - I know exactly how to do them. They're judged by set criteria that I know.

Our fans often tell us that they see themselves in us. The relationship between the guys in Broken Lizard rings a bell with them, because they have their own little friend groups, with their own complex dynamics, and their own private jokes.

The reality about shooting films is that you can shoot many jokes and decide later which one works. So it's not worth fighting about jokes.

We only ever write jokes that amuse us.

If a joke makes our tribe laugh, we assume it will make other friend-tribes laugh.

The smartest thing a filmmaker can do is to become a good editor.

Every time you jump to another format in the 'picture business,' meaning film, television, commercials, the people in the other format go, 'Ah, yeah, you made a lot of features, but you don't know how to do TV' or the commercial people go, 'Oh, you can't do 30 seconds.'

I remember walking into the editing room when I was a junior in college, and I watched the guy make cuts, and I didn't know what the hell was going on. He was just putting these shots together and telling the story, and it was amazing.

Making an independent film is so great because you're your boss. And you have to be disciplined. You know? Because there's nobody telling you anything. But you have to kinda, you know, if you have an instinct to do something, you do it. There's nobody to run it by.

I'm from Chicago. And I was an actor in high school and college, and I wanted to see if I could make a run of it in this job. So, I went downtown in Chicago, and I went up on a stand-up stage and did an open mic. It went well, so I'm like, 'Alright, I'll give it another try.'

We hoped to get a TV show, and we almost did, but 'The State' beat us out for this MTV show. So because they were there, and 'SNL' and 'Kids in the Hall' were there, we thought, 'Let's go try to do what Python did, and instead, let's make movies.'

Colgate is the epitome of having it both ways. Academically, it ranks in the top twenty schools in the country, but it is also a famous party school.

Everybody wants to make more movies. You see any movie, and it's just a feat of human strength and perseverance. It is a brutally challenging business.

If you're not doing something or saying something in comedy, the camera is going to go somewhere else.

If I were in charge of the Olympics, I would probably try to put something for the javelin guy to aim at. Not just length, but see if you could spear something.