“The second we read it, we felt like, ‘Well, we’ve got to do this.’ It really grips you in that way. I think both Regina and I are so drawn to stories about family, about sisterhood, and this idea of what does it mean to have different experiences of your parents? How does that determine who you are in the rest of your life?”

 “It’s really about the struggle for people to make original things and to get an audience for that. We don’t want people to think, ‘Oh, this is just show about a bunch of ballerinas just dancing around’ … It’s about the fragility of the arts. With everything going on, we hope this message resonates.”

“No, I think the joy of the piece is that I was given a character who knew nothing at the beginning when he landed in Middle-earth. All I had to do was play each scene as it came. I didn’t need to worry about what was coming later. [He’s] not the same character, it’s thousands of years before he’ll get there, I’m not playing that part…”

“Comedy is still definitely a group experience. But I think comedy at the moment — and look, you say this and then it changes the next day — but I think comedy has to be mixed in with another genre. Because I think audiences demand kind of a gravity and a stakes and a danger in the movies that they watch — whether it’s emotional danger, or physical danger, or whatever — and I think comedy plays best off of that.”

“With all the obstacles, all the marbles that came rolling under our feet, we got it done. And it’s beautiful.”

Étoile (BTL)

“In terms of editing it the first time, we had a script with the French dialogue next to the English, and you would just try to follow along. Try to pick a word you could [recognize]. It wasn’t like Mandarin or something that’s really hard to understand if you don’t speak it; you could at least hear syllables you could recognize. And we would just follow along and cut a version based on how you’d think it should be cut.”

“[The story] was just so suited for animation, and it appealed to us that it was a way to talk about where we are now, without being ham-fisted, politically, where we are now, without talking about where we are.”

“Ben writes beautiful dialogue, but [Hodge and Mustafa] always add little pluses to it. I remember the scene where Aldis said, [Mustafa] smelled like Old Spice, and it was great. It made me laugh out loud. I ruined so many takes and had to go again because I laughed out loud at something they said.”

“I look at the last two seasons … like an accordion. One piece of the accordion is going out and then this is the compression going back in. There was a lot of setup in Season 4 for Season 5. Everything is gunning towards that climactic end. So it’s exciting at the moment because we’re filming all that.”

“There’s something that happens, I think…to the vulnerability of when you’re laughing, and then something happens that you didn’t see coming. I just feel like you feel it that much more, because you’re just off guard.”

“I truly believe that stand-up — and I hate that I’m saying this — is like a bottle of wine. And I think I’m stealing it from Sideways. But it is an ever-evolving thing.”