Paul Rudd's a really weird, silly, silly man. He gets on 'Friends,' and he gets to show, like, one tiny little window of how truly berserk he can be.
We joke a lot about how, in Hollywood, the writer is one step below the doormat. That's not self-loathing. That's true!
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.
'Reno' was originally going to be a sketch show, with the cops as a transitional element.
We had a great run on 'Reno' - 87 episodes and a movie. Not too shabby.
I think our 'Reno' cops are, basically, if you made us make fun of ourselves at a party. That is what we would do. We would do those characters and not really think about it. We didn't develop the characters; everyone just put on a name tag and started improvising.
Nobody mentioned this in any of the reviews, but the reason we came up with that plot for 'Reno 911: Miami' is because we thought it was just the stupidest title for a movie that we could think of.
'Reno 911: Miami!' is a terrible, terrible title, and all the reviews - good and mostly bad - nobody pointed out how stupid a title that was. But you can hardly come up with a sentence that's more awkward.
In cop shows, the police don't get to rag on each other and rag on their commander and rag on the person they just pulled over. That was all 'Reno' was, and I think that's all cops do 90 percent of their day.
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.
'The State' had never done improv. We used to go over scripts for weeks and argue about every joke. But I don't know how we would have scripted 'Reno.'
The 'Reno' movie is very solid. 'Balls of Fury' I'm pretty disappointed in - I blame myself. People hate both of those movies equally.
Sometimes when you do a whole script, you hand it off, and it gets rewritten by a bunch of people, and people don't really get that much of a sense of how funny you can be.
L.A. is like an oil rig. It's not pretty. It's awful. The air is bad, the view is bad, the people are bad.
It's always hard to watch bad actors improv on your skit.
