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Judd Apatow

Judd Apatow Quotes

Film Producer

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Famous Judd Apatow Quotes

“I remember before I did my HBO special, Chris [Rock] screamed at me - in a loving way, but still. He was like, "You need to do 200 shows in a row and a month straight on the road before you even think about recording a special!" And I had literally booked two weeks on the road and then went right into the recording. It put me in a panic, but it also made me work harder and made me realize that everyone works differently, and that's okay.”

“Everyone is wounded. No one is healthy enough to never screw up, when you're in combat. But, I like to show that, and I like to show how people get back from that. You have to forgive each other. When you're in the middle of a long-term commitment, the essence of it is that everyone is going to have good days and bad days, and it's about how you continue to rejoin forces.”

“Watching shows on Netflix is a different experience because most people are sitting there for three to five hours. Very few people even watch one episode. So it's not like a movie theater where you want to the movies to be shorter so you can go urinate. You can pause and urinate at home, and if something is longer, you're allowed to stop and eat breakfast and then watch eight more episodes.”

“Something economically changed. It used to be that you needed 20 million people to watch a TV show for it to be a hit. Now, with just a few million people watching, you're considered very successful, for a lot of these streaming services, or cable channels. Now, that allows people to do much more creatively ambitious work, because it's not lowest common denominator.”

“At network television you could make a show like Freaks and Geeks, and even though 7 million people watch is every week, you were considered a terrible failure, and they got rid of you and staff. Now ... It's like a world where the replacements are the biggest fans in the world. It's, the Elvis Costellos of television are the winners. Creativity is king and it's very very exciting.”

“I was very combative as a creative person at that time [while The Ben Stiller Show]. I didn't understand how to play politics with the studios. I didn't know how to creatively collaborate with the people who were paying the bills, and that came up all the time on every project I was doing, and it took me a really long time to figure out how to collaborate in a healthy way.”

“You can work on a movie for years, and you won't know until you show it to an audience for the first time if it makes any sense to them at all, if they're touched, if they find it funny, so it's endlessly exciting, because failure is just right there all the time, and your chances of success don't rise that much based on the fact that you succeeded last time.”