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Comedy. It was just huge in my house. Peter Sellers and Alec Guinness, Monty Python and all those James Bond movies were highly regarded.
I like my privacy. I love being a part of [films], but when I'm not doing stuff, I like to go away. I enjoy being a person, a great deal.
You can't think of risks. I have nothing to lose. You either make something that you like, or you don't, and you throw it to the universe.
My father was a very funny man, and one of my strongest recollections is hearing him laugh. He didn't like people who had no sense of humour.
People ask me to record their answering machines all the time. I love it. It's a miracle to me that people want to hear back those characters.
And I love Mel Brooks. My Dad loved his movies, too, they're awesome, the kind of thing that if you're in for ten minutes, you're in for two hours.
I play the ukulele. I have a great group of friends, and we do things like have battles of the bands - me sometimes on ukulele, but mostly on drums.
There's a joy in having the molecule of an idea, then testing it in front of audiences at secret shows that people only know about the night before.
Oh, you know, driving around, coming to a stop sign and an entire family, from 8 to 80, will be looking at me with that Dr. Evil look - pinkie on the mouth.
Verne's all about what you can do versus what you can't do. He just kept saying yes and his part kept growing. I would love to work with him in every movie.
Canada is the essence of not being. Not English, not American, it is the mathematic of not being. And a subtle flavour - we're more like celery as a flavour.
I'm basically a sexless geek. Look at me, I have pasty-white skin, I have acne scars and I'm five-foot-nothing. Does that sound like a real sexual dynamo to you?
Dr. Evil got shortchanged in the first one. The family dynamic between Scott and Dr. Evil - the adventures of being an evil single parent - needed to be explored.
The message of the movie is to accept who you are and not to succumb to the pressure of what the media tells you is beautiful and what you should be looking like.
In 1991, my father passed away and I went on a spiritual quest. It was a light one, not too terribly deep because I'm not terribly deep, and neither was my father.
So they ended up turning this little twenty eight page book into the movie. And it's all about this stinky, smelly ogre who doesn't care what anybody thinks of him.
I came out wanting to be an actor. From my first view of the world, that's what I wanted to be. I'm made of 99 percent ham and 1 percent water. I was just cooked that way!
I can be described as many things, but no description of me is complete without saying 'Englishman.' My parents were from Liverpool and emigrated to Canada before I was born.
I've been involved with Shrek for eleven years, so you'd better like Shrek if you're going to be involved with it for eleven years. I do, I like it a great deal, so I enjoy it.
I grew up in Toronto and as long as I can remember, as long as there was cable, even those old cable boxes that were wired to the TV, there have been Bollywood movies on Toronto TV.
Canada is a country of ingredients without a cuisine; we're a country with musicians without an indigenous instrument; Toronto's a city that doesn't even have a dish named after it.
My father and mother emigrated to Canada in 1958, but there's nobody more English than an Englishman who no longer lives in England, and our home was a shrine to all things English.
My parents would read those books to me as well but they used to make me starving when I was a kid because they were always eating ham sandwiches with the crusts off and drinking ginger beer.
I think that Scottish people, like Canadians, are often misunderstood and what I like about my Scottish friends and relatives is how quickly it can go from love to anger. It's a great dynamic.
I write everything I do. On the average, it takes you about sixty months from the first molecule of an idea to it being in front of an audience. I'm actually somebody that creates their own stuff.
I would love to be a father. I had a great father who taught me how gratifying that is. I'm not going to deny myself that. I think I'd be good at it. Everybody wants that experience. I definitely do.
Europe is scooters. Europe is five young people on one bench sharing a chocolate bar. Their idea of entertainment and fun is so much different than ours, which is exactly why a movie about them would be funny.
And I thought, when I have kids, that's the sort of well told, silly, and fun fairy tale that I would want to take them to. But it was an amazing experience. And I think Shrek is a real classic, a fairy tale classic.
When you're writing these things, you're in a room making each other laugh, you really have very little sense of political correctness or incorrectness. This is a question that Europe tends to ask and America doesn't.
Shooting this one was kind of like a two month party, we would literally play music between takes, and other movies that were shooting on our lot would play hookey, come over and hang out and stuff. We had a great time.
My parents taught me to do whatever makes you happy - follow your bliss. That's why I don't make a lot of movies. I'm very meat and potatoes when it comes to work, putting in eight hours each day. I only do what I love.
I have very happy memories of fairy tales. My mother used to take me to the library in Toronto to check out the fairy tales. And she was an actress, so she used to act out for me the different characters in all these fairy tales.
I'm from Toronto. It's a lot more laid back. When you are thrust into different environments, there is an odd adaptation period. And then there are times when unfair, unkind, untrue things are written about you. That bothers me less now.
I'm a comedic actor, not to mix words, but it's something I think about. A comedic actor. I like to think that Christopher Guest, Phil Hartman, Peter Sellers and Alec Guinness are comedic actors. And Dan Aykroyd, too. Those are my heroes.
Very good training to just be a person is growing up in Canada. People say a lot of things about Canada, like that it's boring, but if you look around the world, you can praise boring. It's a very civilized place to grow up. I'm very proud of it.
Justin Timberlake is the single most talented human being I've ever met in my life, and it sickens me. He is, like, 12 years old or something! He has 0 percent body fat, he is musically gifted, he has a great ear for accents, and he is hilarious.
I love making stuff. There's a joy in having the first molecule of an idea, then testing it in front of audiences at secret shows that people only know about the day before. I videotape those, study them, enjoy being in the character and figuring out the movie.
And I loved the whole idea behind the story, which is that you're beautiful, so don't let other people tell you that you're not just because you don't look like the people in magazines. Or because you're not that weird ideal body image that's out there right now.
I think that there are a lot of great studio people but the fewer voices in my head when I'm getting out a draft, the better. I just get it out and then I'll listen to all manner of good ideas. And that's what happens, too, when I'm touring and doing a character on stage.
Everything I do is autobiographical in some way. 'Wayne's World' was me growing up in the suburbs of Toronto and listening to heavy metal, and 'Austin Powers' was every bit of British culture that my father, who passed away in 1991, had forced me to watch and taught me to love.
At every point I wished that I was born English. They need to make it colder in here. You could hang meat in this room. But, yeah...I grew up in a very English household. My folks were from Liverpool. I've said this before, but there is nothing more English than an Englishman that no longer lives in England.
Most comedians want to be the architect of their own embarrassment. They have horrible self-esteem issues. I would rather push myself into the mud. I don't want to be pushed into the mud. I think that is probably true. I think most people struggle with self-acceptance. But comedians get a chance to self externalize.
I feel entirely grateful and appreciative of being able to make something up and do it, and I'm very grateful how well it's gone. I'm a guy from Toronto who just wanted to be an actor since he was eight so it's all kind-of crazy. Shrek has been wonderfully successful, it did really well in the States, and so it's magical to me, still. I'm still that kid from Toronto.
I've wanted to be an actor since I was eight years old and I did TV commercials when I was a kid. When I was eleven Saturday Night Live came on and I thought, "Oh God, I'd love to do that." I saw the Pink Panther movies and thought, "God, I'd love to have a comedy series; I'd love to have a character I'd created that becomes a series." I've now pretty-much done everything I've wanted to do since I was eight years old and it's a wonderful feeling, I've got to say.