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

When you're a houseguest and you leave, it's nice to straighten something up or send your hosts a useful gift. And when you leave the planet, it's nice to have made a positive contribution.

What is filmmaking but groping in the dark?

I love comedies. I take comedy very seriously as a form. It's a serious form, involving a certain way of looking at life, specifically the painful aspects of life. I get asked, "How can you have such failures in your films?" Well, what else is life about? There's some sense of constant failure in something. Humor gives you a distance from it.

Whenever I'm asked about independent cinema, I think of what Fidel Castro said during the Cold War about the league of non-aligned nations. He said that really, there were only two non-aligned nations: the U.S. and the USSR. The rest of us have to be aligned somewhere. I say similarly, in a way, Paramount, Sony, and Warner Bros. are the only true independents, because they're the only ones who can do whatever they want and have distribution for their films built in.

I never wanted money worries to slow me down or make me take a job I didn't want.

Acting is a lot easier than people think it is.