Sometimes, if you really want to try something original, you step a little too far out of bounds. I mean, there's a market force that kind of unconsciously keeps you in line a little bit.

I believe in justice, maybe not in this life, but there has to be justice. And if there isn't a God, I think it would be very depressing. I'd prefer to believe there is.

I think that came out of watching all those serious movies for all that time. If you watch a movie like Zero Hour, Sterling Hayden is pretty funny, and so are the guys in the cockpit.

It's useless to try and make rhyme or reason of it, because one guy thinks one thing and the other guy sees a whole other thing. So I try not to take them too seriously. Lately I have them screened so I only read the positive ones.

Our fathers were actually business partners in the same real-estate firm, and we got together and thought, How can we get a movie together and get distribution and create a new movie genre? We started by making satires of commercials.

I don't know if I'd want to do that anymore, because you always get bigger laughs on college campuses. So, when the film plays in front of a city audience, you've probably cut too loosely.

I think up until the point when we started in the business, which was in the early 70s, most of the humor was political. The smart humor was political satire.