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 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.

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'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.

[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.

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 think Stanley Tucci was having an affair with his mother. He had this odd quality that I haven't seen him ever get to do again in a movie that just made me think he's got some chops. He's got a strangeness to him, but he's also clearly been stuck in this role because of his looks and his type. He's been really pigeonholed, I felt.