I always felt, and still feel, one of my best strengths as a director is having been an actor for a long time. Nobody knows actors and their insecurities and strengths and everything more than somebody who's done it before.

If you're not connected emotionally to a story, then you're dead. You're really just opening the door for people to lose interest and their minds to wander, for them to start picking it apart.

What you never want to do is have a story that doesn't track emotionally, because then you're going joke to joke and you're going to fatigue the audience. The only thing that's going to string them to the next joke is how successful the previous joke is.

I'm the biggest proponent of test screenings now. There's two ways to face test screenings. For dramas, I don't know if I would rely on them as much, although I still think you need them, because you're making a movie for an audience at the end of the day. But with comedy... You could go through a script or anything I ever worked on, where you go, "This is hilarious," and you put it in front of people and you get nothing. And then the other side of it, is something you're like, "I think this is really stupid," and it gets a giant laugh.

You just have to be classy at the end of the day. That doesn't mean you can't go with a midnight blue tux. And if you can find a deep red tux that looks classy and classic, I think you can pull it off.

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.

I’ve never been comfortable around groups of guys when it gets into the putting-down. My past being a kind of geek - it kind of turns into an attack on the weakest of the group.