I know I've got a degree. Why does that mean I have to spend my life with intellectuals? I've got a lifesaving certificate but I don't spend my evenings diving for a rubber brick with my pyjamas on.
To let the people know there was life beyond Shirley Dean, we decided to focus on voter registration; each day I set up my card table somewhere in the district, signed people up, and passed out noses.
Comedy comes from a place of hurt. Charlie Chaplin was starving and broke in London, and that's where he got his character 'the tramp' from. It's a bad situation that he transformed into comedic one.
I think more airtime should be given to Donald Trump and Orly Taitz. They should run for office together. They should open for Charlie Sheen.
I'm not interested in a film about deceit anymore. I think I was always invested in deceit on some level. But it no longer compels me the way it did for so many years.
I find the stuff that is exciting to me are the films coming out of Taiwan and Iran and France. So I have the feeling I'm not making the films that American distributors want to make.
Phillip Harrison was the production designer, though, I think he's uncredited. He's done most of my films like Blue Thunder. Lots and lots over the years.
When the movie was done, Number Five was crated up. Eric took him over to Germany; displayed him over there because Germans really liked this movie. It was very popular with them.
It evolved out of the idea to make a kids TV show. And it actually turned out to be a bit dull and a bit regulated and too many people looking over your shoulder and it wasn't really.
If I can say one thing for my pictures, it is a certain craftsmanship. A thought which has gone into every angle. There is nothing there without an optical reason.
So slowly in my mind formed the idea of melodrama, a form I found to perfection in American pictures. They were naive, they were that something completely different. They were completely Art-less.
Yes, I was hired by Universal because they needed a comedy director. They had seen Scandal and liked it. I saw an opportunity even in those comedies to begin my project of American films.
I'm just ah, actually developing a tv show for HBO, and I'm directing a film this summer, and actually I'm doing some live shows out in western Canada.
We see less of Dave, certainly, and he's kind of fallen out of the sphere of our group, mostly because he's working on his show, and has kind of lost the fun of the party.
My films usually start with an idea that I get while walking the streets. For example, I got the idea for 'Guard Dog' when I was walking in the park and I saw a dog barking at a bird.
With digital, you do have the advantage of having an absolutely rock steady image because there's no projector gate, no perforations, no film weaving through a machine. And there's no dust and no scratching.
We don't have a full black community in Boston. Our people are scattered. There's a middle class where I live in Highland Park but it's not like a piece of Washington or Chicago.
I think it is more a cautiousness that protects me from enthusiasm about things. I tend not to get excited. People perceive it as a scowl, which is fair enough.
It's something that has informed quite a lot of my comedy - that idea of someone who is always trying to get in there with the right crowd, always trying to be a certain type of person and never managing it.
My character, Rick Spleen, is a what-if version of me, really, where nothing did quite turn out right and everything else is still around the corner.
I think that you really don't have a choice, when you see that things are wrong the only choice you really have is to just do what you can to make it better.
