I take it very seriously, music. I think it's one of the tools that a director has with which to kind of paint. The right music can sometimes do five pages of scripted dialogue.
I think reviewers have become particularly venomous because, in a way, the power has been sucked from them. A 15-year-old can write a review on the Internet and it means as much as Roger Ebert's review, and that just makes Roger Ebert mad, so he comes out harder and stronger.
I think any filmmaker looks back and thinks, 'Boy, if we only had four hours more on that day when the sun was going down,' or, 'If we only spent more time and went back.'
I'm first and foremost a company man, surprising as that is. I love Warner Brothers. That's where I have a deal. That's where I've been for years. So I don't really interact too much with other studios and do things with other studios and I don't necessarily read scripts from other studios.
Well, it's so cheesy to say but you can't find a comedy director who makes movies for critics. When a movie does $580 million worldwide, I'm not saying that proves anything except people were enjoying the experience.
When I was younger I didn't really know what a director did: I knew I loved movies and I figured the actors made it up! And then when you get to 12 years old you start thinking, What does a director do? It was really an organic beginning: this looks like something I want to do, I can't believe people get paid to do it!
When I'm writing, I'm writing for a particular actor. When a lot of writers are writing, they're writing an idea. So they're not really writing in a specific voice.
With comedy especially, it feels like such a clear-cut thing to be a writer-director. There is so much nuance and tone in a comedy that it's hard to contextualise it in a script.
You're only as good as your body of work, and everybody has issues, whether it's Steven Spielberg or Martin Scorsese. I'm not comparing myself to those guys, but you learn more from the misses than the hits.
There are movie sites that love movies and there are movie sites that are just bitter people that just hate movies. I find Movieline to be in the latter. The tone is bizarrely hateful.
I tend to make movies about my peer group. I couldn't see myself now going back and making a movie about a bunch of college kids, necessarily. I kind of always operate in the things I'm observing around me, whether it's friends having babies now in my life or what have you.
I remember that when I got to NYU, everyone was writing scripts. But I was 18 at the time, and when you write a script, so much of it is about what you pull from life, and this sounds sort of cheesy, but I felt like I didn't have enough life experience at that point to write a movie.
I like - there's a better word for it, but I like the danger that a comic brings to a role. It has a feeling, even though everything's scripted and everything's planned what you're going to do. When I see Will Ferrell or Sacha Baron Cohen, there's a feeling that anything could happen.
