Joe E. Lewis said, 'Money doesn't buy happiness but it calms the nerves.' And that is how I feel about a film being well-received.

Adult movies with any artistic credit are released in the last quarter of the year and expected to gird for battle for Globes and Oscars. So the films aren't being seen just for themselves, but rather in a competitive context.

When I'm introduced as a two-time Oscar winner, I'm happy that a film of mine has found an audience and some acclaim because that keeps me in business. A filmmaker's greatest concern is the ability to make future films, so it helps keep me in business.

I always think about visual comedy. I was raised watching silents, and I'm always thinking about how to make cinema, not good talking - although I want good talking. I'm much more interested in framing, composition, and orchestration of bodies in space, and so forth. My goal is always what Chuck Jones wanted his Warner Brothers cartoons to be, which was if you turn down the sound, you could still tell what's going on.

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

I'm attracted to short screenplays. Nobody really wants a film to be over two hours, or at least I don't.

That's how I like to do it with actors, have them really go for it and I'll tell them when it's too much. It's always easier to bring it back then to push it further.