I consider myself allergic to gossip and tabloids, and go out of my way to avoid them.
One weekend, I was driving and in the car next to me on the freeway was a guy who looked like a very conservative Nick Frost, with a short haircut, these horn-rimmed glasses, and he was wearing a jacket and tie. I thought, Oh, there's Nick if he were an accountant in the '50s or '60s.
It's not writing in the traditional sense, but I've always said that the writing process continues on the set and even into the editing room.
Somehow I got a hold of an address for Vonnegut shortly after making the Marx Brothers film. Vonnegut wrote back, saying that he had seen the Marx brothers film and loved it. That became the foundation of our friendship: old movies and comedies.
It took me little more than two years to complete my film, 'Woody Allen: A Documentary.' I conducted hours of filmed interviews with Woody, who put forward no ground rules about questions I could ask, or topics to avoid.
I am a little wary of entering another situation where I would just be another director for hire and I've been doing this in one form or another since I was twenty-two doing documentaries for PBS and HBO.
People in the States live for finding something they can lose their minds over. They have nothing else going on. They watch a show and there's a joke and everybody's up in arms.
On 'Curb Your Enthusiasm,' I remember that sometime in Season 3, there was a Yiddish phrase, 'Kinahura,' and a friend of mine who was Jewish said that the closed captioning said 'Can of Hurrah.' And I thought 'Oh, God.' I never had bothered to see the transcripts but from that point on all the transcripts had to come to me and I checked them.
In any movie, there are a number of scenes that get cut in an effort to keep the film from running too long. Some are of little consequence, but others are important scenes that are very painful to lose.
I don't know that Michael J Fox had done anything prior to that 'Curb' episode where he got to comically play up the whole subject of his Parkinson's. There must have been something very liberating in doing that.
I hate to sound like someone twice my age talking about these comics today and all that, but it's as though their intent or goal on stage seems to be to see how uncomfortable they can make the audience, or how viciously they can savage their subjects.