I was, like, a brown belt, which is pretty good. I entered a tournament once, and I punched the guy in the throat and got disqualified. I realized - I don't know if you're familiar with "Karate Kid," but the bad guys in that are called Cobra Kai, and they're, like, the evil karate guys. And then when I went to the tournament, I realized that's what we were; we were like the Cobra Kai of the Jewish karate community.

I always thought realistic was a better way to explain things that were "dramedies" because life is like that. It's funny, it's dramatic and to me that's how I see it.

The biggest challenge [making Pineapple Express] was that we had a comedy budget. We really got excited the more we got into the development of it about blowing stuff up and having shoot outs. That stuff costs money.

People don't usually wanna kill me for one of my movies until after they've paid 12 bucks for it.

I hadn't done a comedy for a while. I had directed a very low budget movie called The Ape and it was playing at a festival in Austin. Judd [Apatow] was there and he came and saw it and it's kind of funny.

There was a year straight where every weekend, I went to at least one bar mitzvah or bat mitzvah, and we would all go, and it was a lot of fun. We sneak some beer; we'd hang out; we would try to get with girls and not. And usually we'd just end up hanging out together alone.

Sometimes what you lose in the time it takes to let an actor do something that you don't like as a director, you gain in not shutting them down creatively by telling them their idea sucks.