To write a story about New York that only deals with people in your age and socioeconomic bracket, that feels dishonest to me. So much of New York comes from everyone bumping into each other.
An obsessive attention to the news, I've realized, only serves to paint a picture of the world as a throbbing blob of dysfunction, most news falling somewhere on a scale from disappointing to calamitous.
When I write a film, there's a particular thing I am wrestling with and the question or concern I'm dealing with has to be big enough for me to dedicate a year or two of my life. If the question isn't big enough, or rich enough, I'll lose interest.
I don't think evil people or negative people are inherently interesting all the time. People who are good people getting better at being themselves - to me, that's something that's really interesting to watch.
When I go to movies and I love the movie, it's because it feels like it articulated something about how we're living now, and also gives me some insight into my own life. I feel actually altered after having seen it.
In college, you're kind of designing who you want to be. And I wanted to be a big reader.
One man's uplift is another man's sentimental hooey.
All of the things I used to obsess over, I'm no longer as obsessed with. I have new concerns but they're a little more existential or cosmic.
Sometimes I watch the broad comedies coming out of Hollywood and I think, 'You know, sex is a big part of people's lives, but is that really the only thing men are ever concerned about?' People are more complicated than they appear in film or television.
I tend to read things that are a little more on the nourishing side. But if I don't enjoy something, I'll put it down.
There are just things you can explore in a movie that you can't in 22 minutes with a laugh track.
But, yeah, I'm really happy when I'm writing. When I'm being creative and when I have something that I can put down. You know, if you go out and you overhear a conversation or you have a thought, you have a receptacle to go home and say, 'Oh, this would be great in this script.' Your antenna's out in a different way, and I love that time.
We don't have a lot of space in our imaginations to allow people to expand what they do.
It's strange to look back over a full season. Our characters have accrued all these memories, but so have we, the actors. And sometimes the character memories and the actor memories bleed into each other.
After a brief period in which I had let many a Southern Californian convince me that it was all 'in my mind,' I am once again officially allergic to dogs.
I know not everyone starts out reading high literature. If you read enough you might be drawn to some other things, so maybe those vampire books are what they call 'gateway books.' I just coined that term. I don't know if there's a thing called 'gateway books.'
Here's the problem: I don't like who I've become when my iPhone is within reach. I find myself checking e-mails and responding to texts throughout the day with some kind of Pavlovian ferocity - it's not a conscious act, but a reflexive one.
I went through this very serious Woody Allen phase in college and a little bit after college. I still see his movies.
If I'm feeling something, I have a lot of different ways to express it, you know? I can write an article about it. I can write a screenplay about it. I can act in someone's thing.
And as a filmmaker, I'm trying to unhook myself from this idea that unless you have a brilliant, long, enormously lucrative theatrical run, that your movie somehow failed. And I don't believe that.
