I feel this way about a lot of movies, that the characters are idealized versions of people. For better or worse, I am as fascinated with human flaws as anything.

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

Believe me, there is a ton of stuff we shot on Superbad that was unusable, because people were just riffing and riffing. It's just part of the Judd Apatow method, and part of the technique is to also be able to rewrite the movie again in the editing room.

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'm a huge fan of Zach's [Galifianakis] and I auditioned Zach a million years ago on a movie called Duplex which I was fired from. But Zach came in - It was like 2000, maybe - as a buddy stand-up that people were starting to notice and there was something about him I loved. He wasn't quite right for the part in [Keeping Up with the Joneses] and I got fired anyway, so who cares? But I always wanted to work with Zach.

Jon Hamm was the first I thought of for the other role in [Keeping Up with the Joneses], I recently worked with him on Clear History, an HBO improv movie that we had done together.

When I was a TV director working on Judd Apatow's show Undeclared. I was surrounded by so many young people. People like Seth Rogen, who was 9 years old or something. It was just a ridiculous amount of talented young people. I started to think I'd like to see a young-love movie, but not one done in that glossy, Hollywood, high-concept manner we've become accustomed to. One that was, for lack of a better way of putting it, a little more ambiguous, '70s-style, where everyone was flawed, middle-class characters.