The director is the only person on the set who has seen the film. Your job as a director is to show up every day and know where everything will fit into the film.

What's so great about working with really funny women is that vanity comes second. Whatever makes it real and funny, they're going to go for, and it's just great.

What you want is the thing that critics love and audiences love, but that's the hardest thing to do.

If you're not connected emotionally to a story, then you're dead. You're as a filmmaker really just opening the door for people to lose interest and their minds to wander, for them to start picking it apart. That's what people will do, people will naturally tear stuff apart because they're trapped with it, they paid money for it. And they came into it wanting to love it. So all you can really do is piss off the audience. Unless you do things right.

So many of my friends have always been women growing up... I always feel slightly more comfortable around women because with guys in general there's always more of a danger zone... it's very aggressive sometimes the way guys act with each other, putting each other down and calling each other names, so I was always too sensitive for that and used to hang out with the girls. And they were always really funny to me.

A lot of comedies fall apart because they just go from joke to joke, and the characters are all sort of being crazy off on their own.

Everyone takes pause at 40. It's the age you have to assess everything in your life. It's the fictitious marker that's always coming up when you're young. The world really does look at you to kind of have it together by 40, and be successful by 40. Whatever success means.