Most people live somewhere on the spectrum of anxiety and depression.

I was the little guy who knew how to tie a necktie. It came from having absentee parents. They were tremendously loving and caring people who, by circumstance, had to go to work.

I think satire is a luxury of literate middle-class people. People who are well fed and relatively secure in their beds can laugh at their troubles. They can enjoy sitcoms. For those who aren't quite so lucky, well, the irony might be lost on them.

A friend of mine is trying to do a documentary where he brings Jewish and Arab comedians to occupied territories in Israel. He wants to do shows as a way of finding some comedic common denominator. When he proposed the idea to one of the officials at the Jenin refuge camp, the guy just stared at him and said, "This is not a joke to us. We don't think that laughing is the answer."

I made a handshake agreement with my best friend in college, Michael Shamberg, who is now a movie producer. We used to write shows together, and we said, "Let's only do what's fun. Let's never take a job where we have to dress up in a suit."

The trick with sequels is, you have to give people what they liked before, yet be innovative enough so they don't feel like they're seeing the same movie.

It's a great luxury for me to be able to write on the films that I direct, and kind of a nice thing to be able to write enough to get credit, which is difficult for a director.