He bores me. He ought to have stuck to his flying machine. [On Leonardo Da Vinci]
In terms of magnifying it and making it plausible, I'm a great believer in truth in comedy.
I know what I want. I try and convey that at the beginning and set that out, but within those parameters, I'm very happy for them to experiment and try things and give it a go. To me, it's important.
I think improvisation is really crucial in terms of making things feel real and authentic.
It's tough to make funny films. And the truth is, with this process, especially if you write your own movie, then you're giving three years of your life to it. And so, I just have to be sure that when I embark on it that I'm happy to think that in three years' time I'm going to be sitting in a room on the tenth floor of an odd office building at Ginsberg Libby talking about it. So I'm keen not to jump into it too quickly and just make sure it's something that I really want.
And then, movie-wise, I'm writing a couple of things. They're all comedies. It's the only way I know. I'm also being sent scripts, which is really nice, kind of off the back of this, so I don't necessarily have to generate my own stuff. I'm just looking for something that's explosively funny and relatable in equal measure.
With directing, your day is done. When you hit seven o'clock, it's "Cut. " That's what it is. For better or worse, that's what you've got and you have to make that work, and there's something incredibly liberating about that because you can't torture yourself. You have to focus on the moment, and you have to embrace every second and opportunity and maximize that, whereas with writing, there's no imperative there. You just amble along.
I'm sure lots of actors and creative people go through this, where you have some weeks where it's all going according to plan and some weeks where you're super frustrated.
Things change in different countries as people grow, and as generations change.
But I think the only thing that annoys me about that is if I suddenly find someone on commercial radio or something like that, mimicking my voice or actions and trying to promote a product and pretending it's me doing it.
Dreaming led to disappointment, and disappointment to a kind of depressed funk that wasn’t easy to shake. Better to stay in the gray than get eaten by the dark.