When I was very young, I started to make friends with much, much older people. So when I was twenty, my friends were fifty, and I never really went through forty because I would watch them die and I would feel younger. So you make friends with older people and you will always feel young no matter what.

I remember the Time review [on the Hit and Run]said that there wasn't one laugh in it. And I had watched the movie 50 times with audiences, and it always played great. There was certainly a moment where you could tell the audience was like, "Wow, this is really getting weird."

The Cable Guy was underbudgeted, so it was always a debate about whether we could have more days or certain things that we needed, because the budget was determined before the script was written. So that made it a hard production on everybody. But it's also a funny thing, because it's one of those movies that cost $40 million to make and made $100 million around the world, but at the time, it seemed like a disaster that it didn't make hundreds of millions of dollars, because Jim was on such a tear. But it was actually a successful movie.

It's a fun idea, to follow a couple very slowly and show every nook and cranny of their relationship.

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.

I test the movies a lot, and if the audience says they love the movie, we know we're on the right track. And if they tell me they hate it, I try to figure out what I've done wrong. But every time out, the audience wants me to go deeper, they want to know more about the characters, and they don't want these movies to be shallow. So they really urge me to tell them a complicated story, and then when I do so, they're thrilled

I'm making a movie about relationships, and I'm surrounded by guys scared of talking to girls.