Quotes from Robert Ben Garant

There's a studio formula of making a movie that Betty White fans and Ice Cube fans are going to love, so it's a really broad brush.

A lot of times when you're trying to do improv, everybody's doing a different style.

Telltale signs that your movie is going to go bad is, one, the producer of the movie flees the country.

Writing a screenplay's not rocket science, but I was in a bar, and the bartender came up to me and said, 'I saw 'Night at the Museum,' and the thing about him and his kid brought me and my kid together.' Something like that... it's like, 'Oh, right. That's why we're doing it.'

If you have a writing partner that you don't share a work ethic with, it's doomed.

Sketch shows change gears so drastically every two minutes. I think sketch shows are for sketch fans; they're not really for everybody.

'Reno' was originally going to be a sketch show, with the cops as a transitional element.

It's always hard to watch bad actors improv on your skit.

There were guys in 'The State' who would take one script and rewrite it and rewrite it and rewrite it and fight for it for a whole season, and after a couple of seasons, you realized that doesn't work. You have to just be willing to throw something away, no matter how good it is, and write a better joke.

The 'Reno' movie is very solid. 'Balls of Fury' I'm pretty disappointed in - I blame myself. People hate both of those movies equally.

There is so much that I love about all aspects of making a film or a TV show.

What happens is, you write a spec, people get it, they see your writing, they see you're good, they bring you into their office, and they say, 'Boy, that spec was really good - we'll never make that in a million years. We have rights to the board game of Monopoly. What do you think about a Monopoly movie?'

You need to learn that, unless your lead character is written in a way that one of the 20 movie stars want to play him, your movie will not get made.

I don't think people realize how many scripts you write that go nowhere.

I would say, A, you can't really teach anyone how to write good characters, because it's something you have to teach yourself or already have innately in you as a storyteller, and, B, coming up with a good screenplay is a very, very small fraction of what it takes to be a good screenwriter.

It's much easier to get your material out to the public now than it was in 1988, when you basically had to get onto cable to have a joke heard across the country. Now all you need is an iPhone, and you can get your joke heard across the country.

People fight in New Orleans about what's the best po'boy, and Domilise's always comes up. It's the best one I've ever had.

When we were doing 'Viva Variety,' we knew, 'Boy, this really cracks us up, but this is not for everybody. This is a little weird.'

We were going to do 'Reno 911!: New York, New York, Las Vegas,' which was like a 'Die Hard' set not in New York, but in the New York, New York casino in Las Vegas. We were really excited about being locked into the one casino and doing a bad action movie.

If you can learn to be incredibly passionate about your work without fighting for it just because it's yours, that's a huge thing.

The State trained us to make other people's terrible jokes work, which is the other part of the game when you're here.

When somebody would come in with a sketch that was not so good, you figured out in a room how to make that sketch work.

When I walk out of a movie that's actually good, I write emails to anybody I know who was involved with it.