In the writing, I'm just trying to go deeper, emotionally, and learn more about myself and reveal more and find a way to connect with people in new ways.

I like to make movies the way people made movies in the '70s, where they lived and died with these stories, and cared about them, and went to war for them, and they all said something they wanted to say.

I think people like Lena Dunham really opened up the door to what was possible, and they've inspired young women to go into filmmaking and writing and directing and acting in a way that maybe they didn't before, because now there is a path and there are jobs.

I did get good enough to get on HBO's Young Comedians Special, but I certainly wasn't the person who got launched off of HBO's Young Comedians Special. That would be Ray Romano that year. I had some semi-intelligent jokes, but when people would see me, they would think, "Oh, that's a good writer." No one would ever have said, "Oh, that's a good performer."

Any music star would be singing about his lost love. A movie would be about a relatable incident; it wasn't an untouchable magic dragon box. It was something that people could relate to, and when I vanished a girl, it would be a story about a girl that left me, or a cutting into pieces would be a date with a magician. I wouldn't just vanish a girl in a shower, I would do the shower scene from Psycho [1960] with a [Alfred] Hitchcock cameo.

If we really talked about what's wrong with you, you'd need a 7-1/2-hour movie and nobody would know what category to put it in!

If you develop 10 things, and you can get two or three made, that's a very high ration.