I'd always thought that, in all the great sci-fi constructs, there's always the guy who seems like he's the commander, but then you reveal that there's an even bigger puppet master up above and beyond him.

I told my mom I was going to do a movie about a son who hears a story about his mom and takes her on a cross-country road trip, and I wanted to actually take the trip with my mom to see what it would be like to drive cross-country with your mom.

Nobody is out to sabotage an entire script and do an improvisational experiment of a movie, but when they're feeling something in the moment, let them make it their own. That's what makes them great actors.

They always say, doing what I do for a living, write what you know and then people will respond to it. I luckily had a very charming, lovable mom who I think everybody could see bits and pieces of their mom in. All I had to do was write a character that was like my mom, and it made my life easier.

Some of my favorite movies have explored the father-son dynamic, in a very loving way. It can be complicated, but at the end, it's that moment where you're crying because of that core relationship.

I couldn't understand her [my mother's] wiring, all the time. I couldn't understand how she denied herself pleasure and enjoyment in life. As my career got successful and I wanted to do things for her, she wasn't able to allow them because she just didn't work that way. It was always that. It wasn't necessarily ugly, just complicated.

A lot of times, when mother-son or mother-daughter relationships have been put on screen, they tend to trickle towards ugly, and I don't find that totally realistic for the wide swath of us and it's also not that fun to watch.