Paul Reiser
Paul Reiser
Paul Reiseris an American comedian, actor, television personality and writer, author and musician. He is best-known for his role in the 1990s TV sitcom Mad About You. He is ranked 77th on Comedy Central's 2004 list of the "100 Greatest Stand-ups of All Time". The name of Reiser's production company, Nuance Productions, is inspired by one of his lines in the film Diner, in which his character explains his discomfort with the word "nuance"...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionTV Actor
Date of Birth30 March 1957
CityNew York City, NY
CountryUnited States of America
Bob, the guy who did 'Big Fat Greek Wedding,' immediately saw what everybody else chose to not see. This is not a little art film. Bob said, 'This is a big commercial hit.' He realized there's something about the movie that really works. It can play everywhere. It's odd when you see the things that are most personal can end up becoming the most universal.
He is an undervalued treasure of American cinema, ... What I'm finding as we're traveling around is that everybody loves this guy. He's been so good for so long. I see it in people's faces. Women want to hug him and guys want to give him a pat on the back. I think that's one of the reasons the movie starts off so well. As soon as you see his mug on the screen, people are at ease. They go, 'I know this guy. This is comfortable.'
Guys need a little help in knowing how to care for a kid. It's not that I think: Gee, parenting is beneath me. It's just that I wouldn't think of it.
My parenting style could be described as not good cop or bad cop so much as nervous cop. I'm always yelling for somebody to stop because they're about to get hurt. I'm the take a jacket, slow down guy.
It's not like some movies where you're following a bunch of different stories you can cut around. There was nowhere to cut to. It's these guys. We're not cutting back to anybody else
I'd never directed before and this movie's too important to me to put in the hands of some guy who has never directed. Even if it's me
There's something that happens in that delivery room, when a woman becomes ten times more a woman, and a guy becomes six times less a man. You feel really dopey and useless and like a spectator. I did, anyway.
In the original draft I was 27 and Peter was 55 in the script. That's not the same as a guy in his 40s and a dad in the end of his 70s. It's a different point in both our lives.
Once in a while you get a moment of clarity -- an inspiration -- and they don't come that frequently,
Once I let the story brew, I was able to sit down and write it in a couple of weeks, ... I always envisioned Peter in the role, because there are few actors like him. I wrote pages and pages of stuff for Peter to do, knowing we wouldn't have time for it. I wrote these long scenes with Peter ordering food in restaurants and things like that, because I know what he can do with material once he has his way with it.
I'm feeling very vindicated that, when I see the audiences laughing and being moved, we were right. This movie was worth making,
I started writing this before I had kids,
People come up to us and ask how we knew so much about their own family, ... I'm talking about people from faraway places, too. I get people from Turkey and Chile coming up to me and saying I wrote about their family.
Any issues my parents went through are very prominent in the movie, even though they enjoyed a happy relationship, ... The story actually started for me when my mom told me a few years ago that because she got a job, she never made it to the World's Fair in New York, and that's a missed opportunity that always stayed with her.