I'd rather do comedies that strike at some bigger ideas.

I've tried to stay away from mild satire. I want an audience to feel something more powerful for their ten bucks. If they're going to spend two hours with me, and trust me to lead them around, I'd like to take them someplace special.

Life has all of these contradictory feelings and contradictory results. People spend their whole lives struggling to get what they think they want, and even if they get it, they find that it's either not what they wanted, or it comes with so many unwanted consequences. We're always shut off from pure joy.

Groundhog Day was pretty clean. It may have to do with some puritanical feeling that comedy is a forbidden pleasure in a certain way. They make you laugh, and laughter is somehow an inferior emotion to tragedy.

Once you're alienated, you're on your own. That takes you to the world of the existential, where things just kind of float.

Comedy is essentially made by young men, or older men with some form of arrested development, for young men or immature older men.

No one will laugh at how great things are for somebody.