Nicholas Stoller
Nicholas Stoller
Nicholas Stolleris an English–American filmmaker. He is known mainly for directing the 2008 comedy Forgetting Sarah Marshall, its 2010 spin-off/sequel, Get Him to the Greek, and co-writing and executive producing The Muppets and Muppets Most Wanted...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionDirector
Date of Birth19 March 1976
wise worst
The worst thing you can do is animate something, and then throw it out because it doesn't work, story wise.
direct
All of the things I've directed, I'm really emotionally close to. That's why I choose to direct them and spend years on them.
editing watches want
And I watch all the dailies and I grade the jokes or the moments, you know, on a scale from... so I know exactly what we have. And so I can then go into the editing room and be like "I want you to do this moment, this moment, this joke, that joke. I'd like to see 3 versions."
editors giving perspective
Every day is still exciting. I have like a very good system worked out with my editor. Some directors are in there every day, sitting there in the room with the editor. I lose perspective incredibly quickly, and so what I do is I watch...I come in the room and give very specific notes and then I go back to my house or in my office and I watch the dailies.
laughter writing phones
And then afterwards I worked in advertising for a year which taught me about writing even when you don't want to (laughter) because there's never a moment that you want to write about an Erickson cell phone but you have to. And that's really important you know obviously for the...like if you really want to write, you have to write every day no matter how you feel or you know. And then, yeah, and then I ended up working in TV and then from TV into movies and then directing, so.
writing college focus
And writing comedy and it really taught me how to kind of like craft jokes, it sounds like weird but really focus on crafting jokes and trying to make the writing really sharp. At the same time I did improv comedy in college, and that helped with understanding the performance aspect of comedy, you know, because it's different when you improv something vs. when you write it and they're both kind of part of my process now.
believe reading school
I remember reading Dave Barry for the first time and being like oh my God I can't believe you can do this. Watching Mel Brooks and Monty Python and SNL and all that stuff really informed me as a writer and then at high school I started a satire magazine and the college like The Lampoon really introduced me to like you know a lot of very like-minded people who really wanted to like comedy was the center of their lives.
fun world animation
I was able to bring my process of doing improv with actors into the animation world, which was fun.
parent england muppet
I was born in England - though both of my parents are American - and there's something about the 'Muppets' where they have this combination of English and American humor.