Glenn Ficarra
speaker
84 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Glenn Ficarra’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
What's interesting about when we write stuff, one of the reasons we bonded with Dan so strongly when we made Crazy Stupid Love was he was just like, oh, if the scene wasn't working, he goes, oh, it's the writing. Just change it. And that's our attitude, too. When it's our writing, we're just like, oh, this writing is terrible. Just change it.
Anything you can come up with is going to be better than this. And we have that attitude about our writing. Most writers are like, they missed a comma. Very precious about it, sure. And they just want to, they feel like they're being robbed. We're just like, obviously, it's a disaster. The script is a disaster. And you actors are going to come along and save us. That's just our attitude.
And Dan was the same way. And we were like, oh, god, we thought we were the only ones who were like that. And he's like, no, clearly there's got to be something better. So we shoot scripted, and then we like just to goof around.
And it's nice to be a writer when you're directing, and if the scene's not working, you get the scripted scene and then you're like, okay guys, you guys, you know, let's figure it out. Let's figure it out. You know, let's just sit down and figure out how to make this scene work. And then you just go back and you sort of improv and do a little thing and fix the scene.
Yes, it was. We begged. Sorry. We were in Toronto, so we weren't able to do it.
You know, this is an interesting story. Do you mind if I tell the story? Sure. We had just dropped out of them. I went on vacation with my five-year-old six-year-old son. And the phone was ringing off the hook. And I was on the phone just constantly. And the whole trip, and I wasn't able to engage with my son. I feel like I'm missing my son's childhood. And we were booked to go do a movie.
And I said, you know what? We got to drop out of this movie because I just can't. I can't leave my son. I can't, you know, I can't just not be part of him being raised, you know? And we quit the movie and a lot of people very angry with us. And Dan's script landed on our desk the next day.
And it was shooting in LA. I mean, it's just like sometimes that's, and we wouldn't have been able to do it if we had kept that movie. So it was just...
And by the way, you can ask Dan about this. Can you say we said this? Okay. More than anything Dan's ever written, the pilot of This Is Us is a real reflection of his whole life.
And you should pin him down about that. Because I read it, and I'm like, Dan, this is not a script. This is you. Because so much of his back story, and he won't want to talk about a lot of it. But it was a beautiful thing. It came straight from inside him and his heart. We knew him well enough at that point to really feel it. It was really great.
dropping in on a conversation in the family. Right. And so two eyes, always trying to do two eyes over and always trying to crowd the frame. So like you're holding a piece of, like the camera's over here, you're shooting over someone's shoulder and you want to hold a piece of that person in the shot. So there's always two people in the shot.
And also in the cutting pattern, staying on the listener,
more than than you normally would okay so you see people reacting to dialogue as opposed to just and as you know that was a big thing yes and then in the exact opposite for paradise paradise is oftentimes you'll know two one eye like profile because so you're not inside this is a mystery yeah like you're not in you're not in you're not invited in you're outside of this thing
And you want in, you want more information. And this is like, we want to give you too much information. We want to make the audience feel uncomfortable that they're dropping in on this comic.
Yeah, uncomfortable that they're being brought into this family and getting the secrets that they shouldn't be getting. And that's that voyeuristic thing. I think it worked. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like, you know, remember, we would always put the camera and you'd be, we were eventually told not to do that anymore, but we would let the actors drive. Yeah. Remember this?
And we would sit, we'd be in the backseat with a camera.
And we would just shoot you in the backseat like that. Like, like you would a documentary or something. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah. They were not happy.
yeah that's a good point i mean that's a good point because dan and and glenn and i were doing mixed tone and we sort of found each other right and we were like oh wow we're doing the same thing yeah and that and the show was mixed tone right yeah definitely yeah and i think probably that earlier seasons were a little
And then as the seasons roll by, everybody goes to a funeral and they're talking to a friend they haven't seen in a long time and then they laugh and they look around, they're like, oh, I just laughed at a funeral, but that's life. Life is like crying and laughing at the same time. And mechanistically, storytelling, it's the rents. We call it the rents.
Showing 21–40 of 84 · page 2 of 5
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