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.

A pitfall of making a comedy with a studio-and it's also an American cultural thing-is that I get tired of being encouraged to go always for laughs.

If you're not making epic, archetypal films on some level, I think you're wasting a great potential of cinema.

I like actors who, when you see them on screen, you sense a person, not just an actor.

Cinema really lends itself well to big, archetypal stories, you know, classic old stories and you need kind of a weird, big terrain like the Japanese plains for Samurai movies or the West. You need that for these giants to walk around.

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

You just never know when you're living in a golden age.