With both Caddyshack and Vacation, it's not like the subjects were serious enough that they engaged my interest for another round. I love the characters, and the actors were great, but I didn't see the need to make another Vacation movie.

You can't not have feelings about country clubs, whichever side you're on.

Films are big hits when they touch a lot of people. Things are not funny in a vacuum, they're funny because we respond to some personal dislocation, some embarrassment, some humiliation, some pain we've suffered, or some desire we have.

When a director writes, there's a compulsory arbitration. You have a right to challenge any of the arbitrators, but they pick three of four arbitrators who read all the drafts with no names attached and then allocate credit.

At a certain point, you have to convince the actors that you've done the right thing. The way I work, if I can't convince them, I've got to move on. I can't coerce them or browbeat them.

I look for the meaning in what's funny, and I look for what's funny about things that are meaningful to me.

For me, most comedy scripts fail in the mechanical playing-out of the setup. They'll pay lip service to a moral lesson or a psychological progression.