Isla [Fisher] is so pretty we were trying to decide who the hell should play against her that would intimidate her, and one day I said, "You know...this was before Superman had come out, Superman v. Batman: The Court Room Drama I like to call it.

[Keeping Up with the Joneses] is not one of those movies where people get shot and fall down and there's no reality of what would happen if you got shot and knocked over a motorcycle. It's meant to be a slight comedy in that sense.

Even the mistakes and the pain that you've caused and enacted upon you. That is definitely what I'm trying to capture

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.

I talked about the summer of 1985, when I worked at an amusement park on Long Island, the kind of place where someone would pull a knife on you if they wanted a better prize than you were giving them. You found a lot of used needles beside the cotton-candy cart at the end of the night. It was a pretty white-trash, scary place. It was one in a series of terrible jobs I've had, coming from not much money and having no particularly resourceful skills. And at one point one of my friends, a writer on the show, Jenny Konner, said, "You should write about that."

I don't see that many movies where people are depicting middle-class suburban life in a more textured way. My feelings about the suburbs are not so wonderful, so my movies tend to be a little melancholy.

I feel like I'm long overdue for a "one for me" movie, so I've got two low-budget indy personal things I'm working on.