Sundance [festival] is all your Hollywood buds and buddies and rolling out and high-fiving and "Hell, yeah. Here comes the movie," and in Venice, it's very elegant, and respectful...It's decadence. It's such a fun way to formalize a movie that is for us a down-and-dirty, gritty movie. And to see it with the red carpet, and rolling up in a Maserati.

Sundance [festival] is all your Hollywood buds and buddies and rolling out and high-fiving and "Hell, yeah. Here comes the movie," and in Venice, it's very elegant, and respectful...It's decadence. It's such a fun way to formalize a movie that is for us a down-and-dirty, gritty movie. And to see it with the red carpet, and rolling up in a Maserati.

We were in production on a movie called All the Real Girls, which filmed in the Fall of 2001, and we really discovered who Danny McBride was, as an actor. When I say we, I mean me and a crew and a small audience that would hit the art house. He'd never acted before, and it was a really refreshing, eye-opening experience to watch him unleash, in front of the camera, all this comedic potential that we knew he had, as a human being and as the guy doing keg-stands at the party.

Fortunately, working with Universal was just a real opportunity of a supportive entity, who not only financially backed and distributed the movie, but creatively collaborated with us, and gave us ideas and creative ways to make a movie that was budgetarily responsible.

One of the things I wanted to do after three, prolonged movies is to do something that was really, kind-of knee-jerk decisions, and artistic instincts and strip down the process to more of a guttural level, and make something that wasn't so manicured and polished; wasn't quite so developed and supported, and just run wild with it and see what happens with it.

There's something within contemporary culture which is far more faux masculine than it was when men were really men.

Sometimes an actor doesn't sell an idea 100 percent. It just sounds like something that's coming out of their head. You can hear the gears whirring and they're trying to think of what the smart approach is to getting a line across.