[Gal Gadot] is really intense and scary and also incredibly warm and sweet.

I am very interested in the small decisions people make that do set you on a different road in your life. As much as we have influence over what kind of person we're going to become, there are little tests along the way.

I was in college - Carnegie Mellon, which is one of the reasons Pittsburgh was appealing to me - and I personally feel that whole world of what we used to call "college radio" is a big part of what kept me sane through a period where I stopped dating, I felt like a freak, I felt like no girl would like me. You know, a very adolescent response to losing my hair. I turned to obsessing about The Replacements and The Smiths and R.E.M. and getting further into The Velvet Underground. People who, in my sheltered suburban life, I knew of, but didn't know fully.

I guess bittersweet is probably my favorite tone, as a lover of Woody Allen and Federico Fellini and the French New Wave. You know, old Hollywood, sad movies. I guess it's my picture of suburban life, a lot of it being very, very lonely. I wanted to have that infused into the feeling of it.

It actually took me 20 years to want to write about my youth. I was definitely always a little intimidated about writing about that part of my life.

I'm really glad to have made a movie that way on Superbad, because I learned a lot about what can be done and what the limitations are.

I feel like I came from a generation where... We didn't have Vietnam. We didn't have World War II. Nothing cultural was thrust upon us to make men out of us, so you're kind of free to not grow up that way if you don't want to.