I was trying to see if I could produce an episode - completely write it and research it and record it and edit it - all by myself in a week.

The only Sundance [2011] film about cults that could actually have life as a cult film, THE WOODS has the greatest comic insight into why our current culture might inspire a search for meaning in the first place.

If you look at pictures of David O. Selznick , he wasn't even attractive. There's no way to portray him in a way that is glamorous, but that's one of the things that's fascinating to me about him.

There's a fantastic, thousand-page book by David Thomson about [David O. Selznick]. Again, it's not the best argument or the best advertisement for his story, because most people aren't going to read a thousand-page book. But I feel like the rise and fall and the work [Mayer] produced - not just the movies, but the memos, the volume of writing - he's just so passionate, and that's really exciting.

For me, the Dennis Wilson story is a quintessential You Must Remember This story because it's one of these stories that people never talk about, don't really think about, and it's forgotten within this major thing that is thought to be this cataclysmic event of the 20th century.

There are [in Hollywood] some endemic problems and some things that happen over and over again. There's the problem of representation of basically anybody but white men. These are things that we talk about a lot in contemporary culture, and it's interesting to me to go look at film history from the perspective of today.

The thing that breaks my heart about [Dennis Wilson] is that he was very naïve from the beginning to the end.