I hadn't heard the Gary Cooper thing so I'm not grounded now. I feel pretty good. That's incredibly nice. When I met Robin [Williams] at the read-through, I remember when he came in, I was so nervous meeting him for the first time is incredible because I did actually write him a letter when I was a kid and told him he was my favorite actor.

Imagination is the most powerful tool you have. You learn it from all the greats. The Star Wars films are secretive. Anything J.J. Abrams does is secretive. Those guys haven't done too poorly.

Let's be honest, you and I have probably seen a whole lot of family films - you have to do something special. Jim Strouse has the ability to write this hairpin turn between emotion and comedy that is very real. In real life, you don't have time to prepare for the bad stuff and you don't have time to prepare for the good stuff, it just sort of happens.

I fell in love with the book [ Brief Interviews with Hideous Men] and always wanted to do something with and fought to get the rights, which was pretty fun and an incredible experience in itself.

I hadn't heard the Gary Cooper thing so I'm not grounded now. I feel pretty good. That's incredibly nice. When I met Robin [Williams] at the read-through, I remember when he came in, I was so nervous meeting him for the first time is incredible because I did actually write him a letter when I was a kid and told him he was my favorite actor.

Working with Robin Williams, what can you say? He's the best of the best. What I really liked watching was, not only is he incredible funny, probably the funniest person on Earth which is a tough award to give out, but to see what it really takes to be a huge star is way beyond a good partner being extremely funny.

To be an actor and a director, I actually felt it helped me tremendously to be in the scenes of The Hollars, because as you can see, they're very intimate, very intense scenes. You don't want to break the actor's character and you don't want to break their momentum, so as the actor, I tried not to call cut as much as I could, and almost make it feel like a play, just set this environment where these amazing actors could do what they wanted to do.