Literally, my last call was with David Blaine, congratulating him on his show. I have a camaraderie with David.
I used to bug all of the comedians for interviews, and when people want to talk to me, sometimes I'm very receptive and sometimes I say no. Sometimes if I say no, I think, "If they're smart, they'll figure out how to not accept this no."
That's very important to me as well: presentation and how people perceive you, the visual of how things look, your posture. I learned that from [Bob] Fosse and Jerome Robbins, from all the great theater directors and the Busby Berkeleys. You overdeliver: visually, emotionally.
Any music star would be singing about his lost love. A movie would be about a relatable incident; it wasn't an untouchable magic dragon box. It was something that people could relate to, and when I vanished a girl, it would be a story about a girl that left me, or a cutting into pieces would be a date with a magician. I wouldn't just vanish a girl in a shower, I would do the shower scene from Psycho [1960] with a [Alfred] Hitchcock cameo.
I don't think there's really observational magic.
Most comedians weren't great athletes; that was the way they got noticed in high school.
If you're an athlete, you might work your entire life, and you win the Super Bowl once, if you're lucky. And I feel like in the arts and entertainment we win the Super Bowl all the time.
I like human comedies - or dramedies. More than anything, I'm interested in people just dealing with everyday things that are difficult, and there is more than enough comedy and drama in that.
If you work on network TV, they want to pick your casts, dictate your story and how your show works. It just becomes creativity by committee, which is never good.
I think my instinct creatively is to make things that are very funny and happy and silly. And in this moment where the world is very scary, I feel like my role is to make people laugh really hard.
It's a fun idea, to follow a couple very slowly and show every nook and cranny of their relationship.
There's no logic in how Donald Trump thinks. I don't want someone who's the president who says 3 to 5 million people voted illegally when there's zero proof. It's a crazy person.
It seems like magic is something kids start really young.
Donald Trump runs the country like he ran "The Apprentice." The premise of "The Apprentice" is a crazy rich guy has his daughter and his son oversee celebrities doing tasks. And then they come back to him, and they tell him how they did. So in every episode he's like, how did - how'd Meatloaf do, Ivanka? And then she says, Meatloaf really did a great presentation. And then he makes some impulsive decision about who to fire based on not being there, not really even understanding anything.
With comedy, a lot of people develop their sense of humor as a defense mechanism.
In my work, there is a lot of storytelling. The storytelling is not a new thing. Back in the [Howard] Thurston days, the [Harry] Houdini days, the [Harry] Blackstone days, it was stories, but the stories were, "We're going to the Egyptian temples, and we're going to vanish the Prince of Thebes," and, "On my last trip to the Orient ..."
I wrote on the Grammys, and a few times for Garry Shandling when he was hosting. I couldn't have enjoyed those gigs more, because I would get to collaborate and try to make people I looked up to laugh, but for the most part, when you're as talented as they are, what they really want is someone who can type fast and whose presence makes them feel in the mood to write and spew and be creative, and I was a good person to have in the room.
My dad was a big fan of comedy. He wanted to be a stand-up. He loved Lenny [Bruce]. He also loved Lord Buckley and jazz and stuff. He was a hipster. My parents were kind of beatnik-y, you know, for Salt Lake City. But my humor, I think, came from wanting to disarm people before they hit me.
I remember before I did my HBO special, Chris [Rock] screamed at me - in a loving way, but still. He was like, "You need to do 200 shows in a row and a month straight on the road before you even think about recording a special!" And I had literally booked two weeks on the road and then went right into the recording. It put me in a panic, but it also made me work harder and made me realize that everyone works differently, and that's okay.
It's funny, now there are so many bands that I can never remember any of their names. Maybe it's because I'm old.
Maybe you just get so attached to the music of your youth that you think it's better than what's coming out now.
I try to just save a fresh, clear head for whoever I'm working with, so hopefully it's helpful that there's someone who doesn't have to sit in the editing room for 12 hours a day, and who's blinded by the massive footage and options that they have.
I don't really get attached to anything. I'm pretty brutal about cutting stuff. With each successful movie, I've discovered anything that's not connected to the immediate story is going to be cut out of it.
Deer are like dogs. Except for Bambi, they're pretty personality-less.
I always thought that Seth [Rogen] was a fun, caustic, bombastic, sweet, underdog-type of person that I would root for the way you used to root for Bill Murray or John Candy in "Stripes." Seth had something that very few people you encounter have: he had a writer's mind and he had his own comic point of view.
