“Showbiz works well when you give the audience what they want.”
― Jay Chandrasekhar
“Philosophy teaches you to think big.”
― Jay Chandrasekhar
“What makes Broken Lizard, I think, is our timing.”
― Jay Chandrasekhar
“I actually like and love Chevy Chase.”
― Jay Chandrasekhar
“Ultimately, in regular television, you’ve got seven or eight executives and maybe 50 people in the room with dials who are deciding whether a show goes – and it’s not a great way, because we’re making mass entertainment.”
― Jay Chandrasekhar
“’Super Troopers’ did well but not crazy-well theatrically. But it did so well after that it – in ancillary markets – that it became impossible for us to get away from it. We’d get pulled over by cops who would thank us and then would let us go.”
― Jay Chandrasekhar
“What I’ve found is that humans do laugh at the same things everywhere.”
― Jay Chandrasekhar
“The thing about people from Chicago and the Northwest suburbs is that they’re very cocky. I think that serves us well in the show business world.”
― Jay Chandrasekhar
“A lot of people come from small towns, and they come here wondering ‘Can I really make it in Hollywood?’ When I went to L.A., I knew I was going to make it. There’s no doubt about it. Why? Because I’m from Chicago!”
― Jay Chandrasekhar
“History is ultimately storytelling. I think the more stories you write in life – and I’ve written a lot of screenplays, a lot of short stories – you realize it’s your interpretation of events that people read, and they absorb that.”
― Jay Chandrasekhar
“If you hang around people from L.A., they’re, like, used to having their city being maligned.”
― Jay Chandrasekhar
“I would never be comfortable with an edited name. I have never hidden the fact that I am of Indian origin.”
― Jay Chandrasekhar
“I have used the name Jambulingam while editing films such as ‘Super Troopers’ and ‘Puddle Cruiser.’ I like the look and sound of it.”
― Jay Chandrasekhar
“I’ve written close to 20 screenplays and 100 sketches – I know exactly how to do them. They’re judged by set criteria that I know.”
― Jay Chandrasekhar
“One of my random skills is I have a very strong memory for dialogue and moments, and I don’t know why.”
― Jay Chandrasekhar
“We can’t make movies without scripts, and there’s no cost to writing a script, so my advice to newcomers is do it yourself: Write your own script, shoot your shorts, edit your shorts.”
― Jay Chandrasekhar
“That movie – ‘Airplane!’ – it influenced so many of us.”
― Jay Chandrasekhar
“I took one film class at NYU over a summer and learned the basics – you know, how to load a camera and how to light and how to edit – and I became a film editor.”
― Jay Chandrasekhar
“We shot ‘Super Troopers’ on the side of the road in the summer in Poughkeepsie.”
― Jay Chandrasekhar
“We’ve always had a philosophy that we would always go wherever the joke is.”
― Jay Chandrasekhar
“It’s never a matter ever, ever – are – we’re never trying to gross anybody out, or ever are we trying to shock people. We’re just trying to make it funny in a way that makes the audience go, ‘You know, that was the first joke they thought of, and they weren’t afraid to do it.’”
― Jay Chandrasekhar
“Often, when you’re in some of these writing rooms for… and the most restrictive is network television, right? They say, ‘Wow, that’s a great joke, but we can’t do that. Okay, let’s try the second joke. Oh, you can’t do that one. But the third joke you can do,’ and hopefully it will be great, but it will remind people of what the joke really was.”
― Jay Chandrasekhar
“I myself downloaded and watched ‘The Wire,’ ‘Breaking Bad,’ ‘Downton Abbey,’ ‘Mad Men’ and ‘The Walking Dead’ on my iPad while walking on a treadmill. I never turned a TV on once. I never inserted a DVD.”
― Jay Chandrasekhar
“In the summer of 2000, four college friends and I grew mustaches, bought highway patrol uniforms, and shot a $1.2 million budgeted independent film called ‘Super Troopers.’”
― Jay Chandrasekhar
“There has been a stigma around letting movies be seen on home screens on the same day as theatrical screens. Universal said they were going to do it with ‘Tower Heist,’ but they backed off when challenged by the theater owners. I understand where the theater owners are coming from on big studio movies.”
― Jay Chandrasekhar
“There used to be lots of legitimate independent distributors: Fox Searchlight, Miramax, Lionsgate, Warner Independent, Focus Features, Paramount Vantage, Picturehouse and Fine Line. Most of them have closed.”
― Jay Chandrasekhar
“Frankly, I love ‘Scream’: I think it’s one of the great scary/funny movies.”
― Jay Chandrasekhar
“Occasionally, we would shoot something and think, ‘This is it; we are over the line.’ But the test audiences didn’t have a problem with it.”
― Jay Chandrasekhar
“You can’t halt time.”
― Jay Chandrasekhar
“People always ask us, ‘Hey, is there going to be a ‘Beerfest 2′?’ I don’t know if I have another beer joke in me.”
― Jay Chandrasekhar
“I don’t like soft villains in comedy films.”
― Jay Chandrasekhar
“I am convinced that tough villains help make a comedy sparkle because they provide a contrast to the funny guys.”
― Jay Chandrasekhar
“I have always felt a comedy’s story is undercut if you have a villain who is not really menacing.”
― Jay Chandrasekhar
“I have always enjoyed outlaw films such as ‘Smokey and the Bandit.’”
― Jay Chandrasekhar
“I find that there’s so much funny stuff in real life, and I am much more interested in super grounded, real stuff, so now I just want things to feel real and authentic.”
― Jay Chandrasekhar
“I think that society is aspiring towards racial indifference, but the reality of life is not that. And so when you meet someone, you can see their race – it’s right there on their face – and I feel like it’s interesting.”
― Jay Chandrasekhar
“To me, I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, and my identity is of a suburban Chicago person. It’s not like, ‘Oh, I’m Indian.’ I’m not. I’m American.”
― Jay Chandrasekhar
“I think that Broken Lizard movies typically have to be able to star five guys, so it’s like, policemen, spacemen, a basketball team.”
― Jay Chandrasekhar
“’Spinal Tap’ influenced me, I think, specifically in making me really pay attention to tone.”
― Jay Chandrasekhar
“A lot of comedy films, there’s the opinion, ‘Well, if it’s funny, put it in.’ But I think you have to be more disciplined than that.”
― Jay Chandrasekhar
“I think, in a film that’s supposed to last an hour and a half, I think you have to really pay attention to what kind of movie you’re making, what is the audience experiencing, and does this joke fit with this joke?”
― Jay Chandrasekhar
“With ‘Puddle Cruiser,’ the first 15 minutes are the weakest. When you’re total unknowns and you have a weak opening, it’s a real problem. At some screenings, we’d see the odd walkout before the movie even got going. But to counteract that, we’d do sketches before the show to introduce the film.”
― Jay Chandrasekhar
“I remember walking into the editing room when I was a junior in college, and I watched the guy make cuts, and I didn’t know what the hell was going on. He was just putting these shots together and telling the story, and it was amazing.”
― Jay Chandrasekhar
“What I do when I act and direct is I do a small version, go a little bigger, do a medium one, an over-the-top one, and then even bigger than that. I’ll do six readings of the line. And they’re not all the same. Just so I know if I was wrong about what I should have done, I luckily have this more subtle version.”
― Jay Chandrasekhar
“Colgate is the epitome of having it both ways. Academically, it ranks in the top twenty schools in the country, but it is also a famous party school.”
― Jay Chandrasekhar
“In 2010, The Princeton Review ranked Colgate the most beautiful campus in America – I agree.”
― Jay Chandrasekhar
“There was a Burger King in Hamilton, N.Y., where Colgate is, that had three sizes: Small, Medium, and Liter. I would go in there and order a large. And they’d say, ‘We don’t have large; we have liters.’ So they’d make us order liters of cola, which I found to be just anti-American.”
― Jay Chandrasekhar
“’Super Troopers’ benefited from the old way of watching films, the way we watched at Colgate, when you went to someone’s house, looked at their DVD collection, and then just picked one.”
― Jay Chandrasekhar
“We write and write and write until we think, ‘If we have to shoot this script, we’ll be happy, and it’s going to be a great movie.’ I meet with all the actors two weeks before, and I ask them, ‘What lines don’t work? What is uncomfortable for you? What jokes do you think aren’t good? If you’re not getting it, here’s what the joke is.’ You fix it.”
― Jay Chandrasekhar
“I’ve been watching a lot of cable shows like ‘The Wire’ and ‘Breaking Bad’ and ‘Downton Abbey.’ I love how real the moments are.”
― Jay Chandrasekhar
“I’ve come to the realization that you can entertain people both through making them laugh and making them feel. You can be quiet, and they can feel, and you will have scored as well.”
― Jay Chandrasekhar
“I think romantic comedies in general are marketed towards women, and I think men are half the romance, so why not have some that are truly from a male point of view.”
― Jay Chandrasekhar
“If I had to be in the Olympics, I suppose I would do the javelin throw.”
― Jay Chandrasekhar
“I’ve never thrown a javelin. What kind of sport is that? It’s hilarious.”
― Jay Chandrasekhar
“If I were in charge of the Olympics, I would probably try to put something for the javelin guy to aim at. Not just length, but see if you could spear something.”
― Jay Chandrasekhar
“I always feel like any criminal who doesn’t have a mask on is dumb: particularly the ones who don’t realize that all mini-marts have cameras. I find that so hilarious. Or bank robbers without a mask. You’re like, ‘Have you seen no movies?’”
― Jay Chandrasekhar
“The film you know as ‘Super Troopers’ is a film that almost didn’t happen. The script was originally commissioned and developed by Miramax, but when it failed to get a green light, Harvey Weinstein was kind enough to give it back to us so we could make it elsewhere.”
― Jay Chandrasekhar
“As funny as we thought our script might have been, ‘Super Troopers,’ starring five nobodies, didn’t fit the model of a good financial bet.”
― Jay Chandrasekhar
“Integrity matters. What our fans think matters.”
― Jay Chandrasekhar
“Many films you see in theaters are financed through outside sources. With big films, the studio will pay, hoping to reap the reward of their big bet. But with medium and small-sized films, outside production companies and financiers often foot the bill.”
― Jay Chandrasekhar
“A lot of comedies in the 1980s and 1990s had all these colors and were so brightly lit. But John Landis had this dark style, like a Scorsese film.”
― Jay Chandrasekhar
“The first thing I do in the editing room is the ‘radio edit,’ where you listen to the dialogue and don’t even look at the visuals. The rhythm, the music of the comedy, has to work.”
― Jay Chandrasekhar
“If you’re not doing something or saying something in comedy, the camera is going to go somewhere else.”
― Jay Chandrasekhar
“Look at the opening sequence of ‘The Blues Brothers,’ which starts at the prison. The way it was filmed, it does not look like a comedy. I thought that was great.”
― Jay Chandrasekhar
“The smartest thing a filmmaker can do is to become a good editor.”
― Jay Chandrasekhar
“Filmmaking, at the end of the day, is really – in addition to the story and all of the equipment and the actors, it’s really about time management. And so the smartest filmmakers are the ones who sort of pre-visualize the film in their head and are literally shooting the shots they need to cut the story together.”
― Jay Chandrasekhar
“Violence is totally accepted in this country.”
― Jay Chandrasekhar
“Every time you jump to another format in the ‘picture business,’ meaning film, television, commercials, the people in the other format go, ‘Ah, yeah, you made a lot of features, but you don’t know how to do TV’ or the commercial people go, ‘Oh, you can’t do 30 seconds.’”
― Jay Chandrasekhar
“When we had Brian Cox in ‘Super Troopers,’ we learned that when you put a great actor in the center of our lunacy, it grounds everything.”
― Jay Chandrasekhar
“When Broken Lizard writes a movie, we reject everything that doesn’t have five guys as leads, so it needs to be cops or a basketball team; that’s what we can do.”
― Jay Chandrasekhar
“I was pre-med for a semester, and then I got a C- in organic chemistry and was washed out of that program. Then I imagined I’d be a lawyer. I was gonna go to law school.”
― Jay Chandrasekhar
“’48 Hrs.’ is very tough and funny.”
― Jay Chandrasekhar
“’Smokey and the Bandit’ is tough and funny.”
― Jay Chandrasekhar
“You see any movie, and it’s just a feat of human strength and perseverance. It is a brutally challenging business.”
― Jay Chandrasekhar
“I started standup at age nineteen. I decided that the only way I was going to try show business as a career was if I could make total strangers laugh.”
― Jay Chandrasekhar
“I did a lot of standup from ages 19 to 24 but then stopped to focus on sketch with Broken Lizard.”
― Jay Chandrasekhar
“Like hitting a baseball, comedy is very much about timing. To some degree, you either ‘got it or you don’t.’”
― Jay Chandrasekhar
“Whether I’m performing or directing, I’m aways thinking about rhythm; sometimes it’s nailing the right rhythm, and sometimes it’s intentionally breaking the rhythm. Those two things are what make something funny or not. How long a shot is and where you put the camera are all part of that rhythm of directing.”
― Jay Chandrasekhar
“Growing up, I was the only Indian kid around for miles, so I ached to belong. I had a neighborhood pack of nine guys and two girls, and we hung out all the time. We played football, baseball, and broom-hockey on the iced-up lake.”
― Jay Chandrasekhar
“Our fans often tell us that they see themselves in us. The relationship between the guys in Broken Lizard rings a bell with them, because they have their own little friend groups, with their own complex dynamics, and their own private jokes.”
― Jay Chandrasekhar
“If a joke makes our tribe laugh, we assume it will make other friend-tribes laugh.”
― Jay Chandrasekhar
“The reality of show business – and I suppose a lot of businesses, but specifically show business – is that it is this business of ‘no’s.’ It’s mostly ‘no’s.’”
― Jay Chandrasekhar
“A lot of the original people on ‘SNL’ came through Chicago – and Toronto, I’m sure – but Chicago was the center of it all. When I was there, Chris Farley – I knew him; we hung out and stuff – he went off to ‘Saturday Night Live,’ it was like, ‘It’s possible to be from here and make it.’”
― Jay Chandrasekhar
“I think there’s a pedigree that comes with being from Chicago that gives you some cache outside of L.A. and New York, where, frankly, most of show business really is.”
― Jay Chandrasekhar
“A lot of filmmaking is just sort of slowed down by lawyers who feel they’re more important than the filmmakers.”
― Jay Chandrasekhar
“I’m from Chicago. And I was an actor in high school and college, and I wanted to see if I could make a run of it in this job. So, I went downtown in Chicago, and I went up on a stand-up stage and did an open mic. It went well, so I’m like, ‘Alright, I’ll give it another try.’”
― Jay Chandrasekhar
“We hoped to get a TV show, and we almost did, but ‘The State’ beat us out for this MTV show. So because they were there, and ‘SNL’ and ‘Kids in the Hall’ were there, we thought, ‘Let’s go try to do what Python did, and instead, let’s make movies.’”
― Jay Chandrasekhar
“My father and mother were both doctors, yes.”
― Jay Chandrasekhar
“We only ever write jokes that amuse us.”
― Jay Chandrasekhar
“The thing about our movies is, we write thirty drafts. That’s a very detailed script. Which means that if you try to crank it out week to week in television, it’s impossible.”
― Jay Chandrasekhar
“All I can do is keep my nose down and shoot the scene, shoot the scene, make it funny, make it funny, make it funny.”
― Jay Chandrasekhar
“The funny thing about any cop uniform is that people will do what you say when you’re wearing a cop uniform.”
― Jay Chandrasekhar
“Making an independent film is so great because you’re your boss. And you have to be disciplined. You know? Because there’s nobody telling you anything. But you have to kinda, you know, if you have an instinct to do something, you do it. There’s nobody to run it by.”
― Jay Chandrasekhar
“Making films requires the creative skills you’d expect, but it also demands immense non-creative skills, like the ability to raise all that money and the savviness to work the studio’s politics.”
― Jay Chandrasekhar
“This career is a relentless hustle because Hollywood is crowded with too many smart, talented people pursuing the same dream and the same pool of entertainment investment dollars. And unlike in law or medicine, there are no college degrees required – no barriers to entry.”
― Jay Chandrasekhar
“If you want to provide for your family, maybe show business is not a high degree of success. You will need to keep your day job until you make it, and know it’s an odds thing just like the NFL. I personally wouldn’t recommend anybody to go into this business.”
― Jay Chandrasekhar
“’Spinal Tap’ is interesting because it created a genre of film and ended it – all in one motion. If you do a mockumentary, you are always going to be compared with that film, and you are never going to be as funny.”
― Jay Chandrasekhar
“When I started, there were no Indians on television or films, except for Sir Ben Kingsley. I was an actor in high school, college, and I played leads. And when I graduated, I knew that I couldn’t go to Hollywood and audition for shows or films. I could try, but where was the evidence that it was going to happen?”
― Jay Chandrasekhar
“The reality about shooting films is that you can shoot many jokes and decide later which one works. So it’s not worth fighting about jokes.”
― Jay Chandrasekhar
“It takes a year for us to generate a script that is ready to shoot. There are maybe 20 drafts of a script. And, each time, someone saying ‘I don’t really love this,’ we discuss it for 15 minutes.”
― Jay Chandrasekhar
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