I did an interview with my friend Natasha Vargas-Cooper for comedy website Splitsider. It’s really self-indulgent, but if you’re interested in directing sketch comedy, I go into a lot of detail about how I approached doing the show. Which premieres tonight at 10:30. Please watch it, or else I have to go back to making porn.
So anyhow, I’m really excited about seeing the world get to watch this show my friend Peter directed. At heart, he’s a filmmaker in every sense of the world. He’s thoughtful about every technical choice, and obsessive about the language. Furthermore, he knows what’s funny. And furtherfurthermore, he’s one of the kindest people I know.
This interview by my other friend Natasha (I have two friends!) is a great one. I love when good things happen to the right people.
Here’s Peter on verisimilitude as a comedic device:
Ben Stiller did things that were very ahead of his time on his show. I think he’s really under-appreciated as a director for how he nails the look and the tone of the things he’s parodying. That show and SNL’s commercial parodies were my earliest influences. I was always drawn to comedy that looked exactly like the thing it was making fun of.
