David Zucker

I lose tons of stuff on the cutting room floor. For Scary Movie 3, for example, we had a lot of Matrix spoofs, a Hulk scene, and some of that stuff just doesn't hold up - it's too much plot, audiences just didn't want to hear about it. ”

Our fathers were actually business partners in the same real-estate firm, and we got together and thought, How can we get a movie together and get distribution and create a new movie genre? We started by making satires of commercials. ”

I think up until the point when we started in the business, which was in the early '70s, most of the humor was political. The smart humor was political satire. ”

I think we grew up thinking that the funniest things on TV were the old, serious movies. I always liked the Marx Brothers, but the thing that always made us laugh were movies like Zero Hour. That's what inspired us. ”

It's useless to try and make rhyme or reason of it, because one guy thinks one thing and the other guy sees a whole other thing. So I try not to take them too seriously. Lately I have them screened so I only read the positive ones. ”

Quit now, you'll never make it. If you disregard this advice, you'll be halfway there. ”

We didn't realize it at the time, but the release date, the ad campaign and the poster are so important. ”

The only one that got through was Jimmy Walker, because he plays the gas station attendant. I mean, there's nothing wrong with it, it's just that we were kind of purists at the time, and we didn't want any comedians. ”

It didn't happen every time for every movie. Ruthless People was a good movie, but we didn't get a good release or marketing. They completely blew the opening. ”

I think that came out of watching all those serious movies for all that time. If you watch a movie like Zero Hour, Sterling Hayden is pretty funny, and so are the guys in the cockpit. ”