“I think when Sarah Palin opened her mouth and started talking, the more she talked, the less appealing she became.”

Studios just sometimes make decisions on their own that you’re always flabbergasted by. It just happens that way for whatever reason – not even pointing fingers, it just is.

Craig Nelson who is an actor and is in a show called Coach in the United States. We began to do some improvisational stuff and we used to get laughs and things.

I think certain movies work and that is part of the magic of it all. We can’t truly define why something succeeds.

All I try to do is create an atmosphere that seems comfortable enough, that it removes tension and everyone feels free. If they feel free then behaviour happens, small moments happen and that’s what ultimately works the best for me.

It’s always hard to explain why an audience ultimately responds to a movie.

You have a movie and it proves itself and then certain things happen.

First of all, just to get Diner made would have been an achievement in that I got a chance to direct.

There was a time when I said, “I’m going to go do a television thing,” after doing all these theatrical films, and heard, “Television? Why are you going to go back to television?” It’s an interesting place.

I don’t know that you can do an absurdist film and just have everybody embrace it in terms of filling out cards. I just don’t think it happens. So you have to prepare an audience.

I don’t know that you can do it as a satire. I mean, the business is crazy enough as it is. It’s like doing Wag The Dog – we took a thing that was almost completely absurd on one level, and then ultimately those things came about.

You do understand that you can’t force the situation, but in terms of how you edit, you can define that to take the audience along, whether it be a storyline or a character moment that we can play out. The more experience you’ve had, the more beneficial it is, period.

The interesting thing about movies, it’s not always – y’know, you have to have structure etc and all those things, but an audience responds, in many ways, we walk away and certain things stay in our heads that are memorable.

I play around with human things, human relationships and that, and allow that kind of talk to work in that way, on that level.

No one really has the power, and everybody’s trying to get through the day, and everybody’s nervous and desperate.

I got a chance to work with Mel Brooks on two of his films: Silent Movie and High Anxiety.

I would give the cameras to the kids in the swimming pools and they would play with them, and then I would collect them and we would upload it. If you’re in the process, you’re there.

Evolution and creationism both require faith. It’s just a matter of where you choose to place that faith.

To a true-blue professor of literature in an American university, literature is not something that a plain human being, living today, painfully sits down to produce. No; it is something dead.