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.

A book is a book, but a movie is a movie. The more faithful you are, the more you'll come up with Harry Potter #1 and #2, which are like filmed books on tape. They're so petrified of turning off the readers that they make no concessions to the fact that they're trying to make a piece of cinema.

Just because I make films doesn't mean I think they're great. I just make them and then when I'm done with them I'm just a filmgoer like I always am. They're all lessons. I'm still in film school, honestly. And this one is just a dry run for whatever the next one is.

As the years go by and I make more films, I am increasingly interested in capturing place as a vivid backdrop for my films.

I'm considered to some degree a successful director working in Hollywood, making films my way but using studio financing. But with almost every single one, I get praised up the wazoo by people who never would have financed the films. It's: "Gee, this movie is so new and different - what do you want to do next?" "This." "Oh, that's too new and different."

I spend a long time casting, but once I've cast a film there's a reason why I selected those people. So I'm hands-on in selecting the cast, hands-off to see what they do with their characters, and hands-on again to offer suggestions.

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.