I found it was my good fortune to somehow be able to work in these forms that I loved when I was a kid. I love movies and I could write screenplays. I love theater and I could write plays. I mean, they would be my own, I could never write what was used to be called the well-made play. But my first play, "Little Murders," turned out to be a great success and a great influence on plays at that time.
In the Depression, besides everybody being poor, our entertainment was much more primitive and innocent. The comic strip, which I so venerated, was still a very new form. Movies had just become talkies. Radio had just gone coast to coast for the first time. Network radio had just begun when I was a kid. So all of these forms were more or less in their infancy, and feeling their oats. Comics were fresh and funny and nervy, and in a sense, defiant of the prevailing culture.
Maybe when we were shooting in the school, I was feeling more like it. Every time I go back to a school for work, I always feel so huge. Everything seems so little. The lockers seem smaller than I remember and the length of the hallways seem shorter when you're a kid.
I've never really thought in terms of taboos. I think that books can really help parents and kids talk together about difficult subjects. I've always felt that way.
Paul Gleason played the teacher. I just tortured him as best I could. 'Cause he wasn't one of the kids, you know, so it was okay. He was great.
I was a big TV kid.When I was a kid, I would go home at 3:00 and watch TV straight through to the end of Letterman at 1:30 in the morning.I was obsessed with comics.And I would watch Jerry Seinfeld and Jay Leno and study them as if it was Tolstoy.
As a kid, I was obsessed with the Who. They were the most important band to me. Songs like "I'm One" helped me get through high school.
I have to go back to vinyl every once in awhile, even if my kids don't want to hear it. I'm much more likely to be listening to Wilco or the Avett Brothers.
It seems like magic is something kids start really young.
The only thing I knew in the world as a little kid was comedy. And no other kids in my school cared about it at all. There was no one to talk about it with. You know, we're in a geek culture now where comedy is so giant. I'm one of the people that, you know, works on Funny or Die. And there is just a giant culture of comedy nerds. But back then, I was alone, and I had a little confidence about it because I felt like, this is my thing, this is the only thing that only I know about.
It's a pretty humiliating thing when you get picked last every day in gym class and then at lunchtime all the kids play sports and you get picked last. At the time I just thought, "This is awful," because it defines you as a weak person. It defines you with girls and if you're bad at sports, you get into this funny cycle where the ball never gets to you because now you're in the worst position, you're in deep right field, so you can never prove that you got better, so the cycle lasts forever.
I still feel like a weird kid who is about to take a punch in the face. So, I think it's permanent.
I think watching too much TV as a kid led me to being very uncomfortable in new situations. To this day, when I drop my kids off at school, I still feel like I'm in 9th grade and I'm uncomfortable and insecure. Like anyone is paying any attention.
If you're a black kid, you're going to have hell in your life.
We were created to be woman and man and make kids.
It's not going to surprise me if our kids end up running on the beach in Florida when they're 100 years old on regrown body parts with a much higher quality of life than we can begin to imagine.
When I was a kid, maybe 11, I remember saying, "When I grow up I wanna have enough money to buy a really cool car, because I won't."
If my kids decide to be actors and really, truly love it and are passionate about it, then I would definitely want to help them along their way, but it's a tough business.
To be quite frank and honest with you, it drives me absolutely crazy when my kids fight, the sound of them fighting and not getting along.
My parents are the ones who really help me be grounded. I still go to school, I still do fun stuff with my friends; for the most part, I am a normal kid. It just so happens that I do some acting too!
You can mythologize Steve Jobs, but really in the end, he was a kid from the Valley, with his funny little friends, and they made something. That's all he was.
I've always heard music in my head since I was a little kid, so I've always played towards that. If I felt bad, that's what I did.
Looking back on myself as a little kid, I see seeds of entrepreneurship.
I like working with kids because I enjoy seeing the looks on their faces and, it's kind of selfish, I want a future audience.
Social media puts us inside our phones and our computers and our headphones, and we're not connecting so much with our outside environment. Even when people go to the Grand Canyon they're more concerned about the selfies than actually looking at the canyon. I see it with my own kids - the addiction to needing things fast, never pausing to just see what's around us and connect with our fellow human beings in real time.
