So something I've felt I've learned with The Cosmopolitans shoot is using some agility and changing things quickly. That's something I found really useful on this shoot too. The gestation of The Cosmopolitans and this are slightly different from my other films. The script would be done and I'd be cutting it, but I wasn't always writing new material.

I think it's helpful to aspire to make films if you feel that other people are not doing what you want to do.

In my father's time - he was in college during many transitions in the late 1930s - they had great institutional loyalties... to his college, eventually the navy, the Democratic Party and certain ideals of our country. Those are the things that became broken with my generation.

The creation of a film starts with an idea, a notion of a time period or characters, and you get really excited about the idea, and sell it to others if you need their support to write the script. You can't wait to get started, and then you try to start, and you struggle with the blank page, and you get some ideas, and they're bad ideas, and you write bad stuff. It's really bad.

I love watching the romantic comedies of the late '50s and early '60s. I used to have a rule that if Tony Randall's in it, it can't be bad.

[ Lady Susan novel by Jane Austen is] extremely difficult to adapt. I worked on it for years, for, like, ten years, before I started showing it to people. This was my back-burner project.

Find someone hypersocial and crazy and try not to follow them to their doom, but to make friends with their nicer friends.