My flag is always flying. My shingle is always out. I'm always looking for movie ideas. The hardest part of this whole movie-making endeavor is finding ideas. That's the real goal.

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.

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.

I always wanted 'Sideways' to be like a great 1960s Italian film.

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.

What science-fiction premises do is it gives you a "what-if" prism to look at the contemporary world with a wack on the side of the head.

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.