Film is such a powerful medium. It can really affect change; you can affect so many different people in different ways.

Lily Tomlin said something years ago, and I'm paraphrasing, that you have to find humor in everything, because by finding humor, you find humanity.

Seventy-five percent of Americans don't even have passports. We don't even think about traveling beyond our borders.

I think most Muslims are incredibly upset with the state of America's foreign policy today and the state of the world.

One of my beliefs as a filmmaker is that if you can make somebody laugh, you can make them listen. With laughter, you can get somebody's guard down, you can open them up to listening to you. They don't feel like they're being preached to or talked down to. I think it helps, it makes really hard to understand information a little more accessible and palatable. And at the end of the day, it makes a movie a little more fun. It doesn't feel so heavy handed.

I don't know. I have incredible amounts of hope that things can change. It takes people who believe.

I think that's one of the biggest goals I had in making a movie, was listening to what other people had to say.