Even Gene Kelly: I always preferred him to Fred Astaire, just because he was more athletic, like skateboarding. His leaps were big. There was something really great about his moves.

I just wanted it to be American.

I never cared so much about making perfect sense. I wanted to make perfect nonsense.

For certain things, certain audiences, people will laugh. And in other places, there's dead silence. And I enjoy them both. You try to make films where it's never one way - like life.

The first time I hung out with [David Blaine], he took me to this condemned building, and it had a pizza oven and he crawled into the pizza oven and turned the heat on to 400 degrees or something like that, and he stayed in it for I guess a half hour. He came out, and except for one or two second-degree burns, he was unscathed. You meet a lot of musicians and filmmakers and actors, but it's rare to meet someone who can step inside a pizza oven and take the heat. I was intrigued by that.

I never cared about making one coherent masterpiece with a conventional narrative. I always wanted my movies to have images falling from all directions in a vaudevillian way. If you didn't like what was happening in one scene, you could just snooze through it until the next scene. That was the thing about vaudeville: You didn't have to worry about the beginning and ends of these things.

I like working with family and friends and people I admire. All my movies are filled with family members of some capacity. I think it means more when you have a personal relationship with someone.