As a director, I also get to sit and watch actors and learn from them in a way that I don't get to do when I'm just acting.

The constraints of melodrama can be a great blessing, because they demand that all the characters involved - as absurd and extreme as they may initially seem - must stay utterly rooted in their own reality, or the whole project collapses.

There is a joke that I use all the time. I say it to my kids. I used to say it to my wife. She'd be talking to me about something very serious and then I would just look at her and go "Where are you from originally?" And she would go "Humphhh! C'mon. That's terrible!"

People wear shorts to the Broadway theater. There should be a law against that.

I'd read Up in the Old Hotel, and I wanted to do something with Mitchell's stuff for a long time.

I hate movies that take a long time to shoot or directors that labor over every shot or do excessive amounts of coverage and excessive takes and don't keep things moving or constantly cutting.

My partner, Beth Alexander, and I want to produce smaller films, but commercially viable films that will enable me to make the kinds of movies I want to make.