Hollywood is the kind of place that takes what you do well in one thing and manufactures it so the joy can be taken out of it.

I don't know if I'd call myself a prodigy, but I was a big forensics competitor in high school, and then during college I spent some time working at speech and debate camps as a coach.

Josh Gad and I have been friends since the time he auditioned for Modern Family. I directed the pilot for that, and that's how we met.

When you get into the series, the progression is much different. You actually have breathing room and the chance to sit down with each actor, which was a part of our process, to talk to them about their pasts.

The actual truth about Gad is it's one of the original 13 tribes of Israel, so you can actually trace my lineage back to, like, those guys who had, like, a hand in the Bible and have since become very famous from that. So I come from very famous lineage. Granted, they didn't have cameras back then, so none of them had TV shows.

Part of our goal, in the episodes moving forward, is to deepen and dimensionalize every other character, to get into their relationships with each other, expand that stuff and really sink our teeth in.

Hollywood is the kind of place that takes what you do well in one thing and manufactures it so the joy can be taken out of it.