If you were falling in love and you could go back in time and relive a day and see the banal things you did that you'd forgotten about, you'd weep, looking at that day.

The thing is, right now the films don't need to be overtly political to be about our times. We also need films that are just human, that are about people. People need that, too. It's like we need to reconnect to what it is to be human. Not just what our political situation is. That's not what I'm thinking about exclusively. Human content is needed again, as it was in the '70s. I think films were more human than they've been since then.

But it's just that the whole country is making generally lousy films these days and has been for quite a while. That's the big problem that we all have to think about.

Comedy is a wonderful device for distance that allows us to look at what we're talking about with some degree of distance and hopefully with a bit more perspective and honesty. With many exceptions, a movie with no jokes is far less appealing to me.

If you have your movies so that everyone understands everything, I think that's probably not a very good movie.

I mean, look, I love movies, not just the ones I make... In fact, I don't like the movies I make very much.

I want studios to be financing director-driven, auteurist cinema, as they did in the '70s. I think it's starting to happen now. Plus, because of how our world has changed politically, I think audiences are demanding more realism. We need to have more stuff in our culture about what is really going on right now.