If You Were Falling In Love And

I Don't Think So Much About Verbal Comedy. I Always Think About Visual Comedy. I Was Raised Watching Silents, And I'm Always Thinking About How To Make Cinema, Not Good Talking - Although I Want Good Talking. I'm Much More Interested In Framing, Composition, And Orchestration Of Bodies In Space, And So Forth. My Goal Is Always What Chuck Jones Wanted His Warner Brothers Cartoons To Be, Which Was If You Turn Down The Sound, You Could Still Tell What's Going On. I Think If You Watch Most Of My Films With The Sound Off, You Could Still Tell What's Going On.

Each One Of My Movies Becomes Easier To Get Off The Ground.

The Thing Is, Right Now The Films Don't Need To Be Overtly Political To Be About Our Times. We Also Need Films That Are Just Human, That Are About People. People Need That, Too. It's Like We Need To Reconnect To What It Is To Be Human. Not Just What Our Political Situation Is. That's Not What I'm Thinking About Exclusively. Human Content Is Needed Again, As It Was In The '70s. I Think Films Were More Human Than They've Been Since Then.

I Love Comedies. I Take Comedy Very Seriously As A Form. It's A Serious Form, Involving A Certain Way Of Looking At Life, Specifically The Painful Aspects Of Life. I Get Asked, "how Can You Have Such Failures In Your Films?" Well, What Else Is Life About? There's Some Sense Of Constant Failure In Something. Humor Gives You A Distance From It.

I Could Never Be A Part Of An Adaptation Of A Film Where There's Pressure To Not Disappoint The Immense Fan Base. In Those Cases, They Often Wind Up With Filmed Books On Tape, Quite Uncinematic. Having Said That, I'd Say All The Adaptations I've Done Are Quite Faithful To The Original... You Have To Pick And Choose Which Storylines And Plot Threads, Because You Don't Have The Time To Kill In The Film As They Have In Novels. All Those Pages With Detours And Plots And Different Storylines. But Films Add A Lot, And You Gotta Keep It Moving.