I Think That Peter Jennings Is The

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.

In A General Sense, To Convert Any Short Story, Novel, Play, Or Opera Into A Movie, You Have To Re-rig It. Even Though They're All Narratives Over Time, They're Very Different Forms.

A Book Is A Book, But A Movie Is A Movie. The More Faithful You Are, The More You'll Come Up With Harry Potter #1 And #2, Which Are Like Filmed Books On Tape. They're So Petrified Of Turning Off The Readers That They Make No Concessions To The Fact That They're Trying To Make A Piece Of Cinema.

Comedy Is A Wonderful Device For Distance That Allows Us To Look At What We're Talking About With Some Degree Of Distance And Hopefully With A Bit More Perspective And Honesty. With Many Exceptions, A Movie With No Jokes Is Far Less Appealing To Me.

I'm Considered To Some Degree A Successful Director Working In Hollywood, Making Films My Way But Using Studio Financing. But With Almost Every Single One, I Get Praised Up The Wazoo By People Who Never Would Have Financed The Films. It's: "gee, This Movie Is So New And Different - What Do You Want To Do Next?" "this." "oh, That's Too New And Different."