I'm of a generation of director that came up understanding special effects.

I remember watching the 'Iron Man' cartoons when I was younger. I remember reading the origin stories and some of the Silver Age stuff, and I read 'The Avengers' - 'The Defenders' and then 'The Avengers' - and that sort of brought me into 'Iron Man.'

I remember the first script I wrote after 'Swingers' was a Western, and I just couldn't get it made.

Online theft has changed the business model of filmmaking because the DVD market is very soft. So, more ambitious, compelling, character-driven narrative of a certain budget level isn't really a viable business model in the eyes of the studios right now.

Once you buy into a television show, there doesn't have to be resolution from week to week. You can develop characters and storylines and react to the audience, so you get more of a serialized version of storytelling where you can go much deeper into each character. It's more like a novel.

I know that when I watch TV, I want to be transformed and transported, not just by the characters that I grow to love over the hours and seasons of watching but also the world that it plants me into.

You have to find something that you have to obsess over if you're making a movie about it. As a director, you have to be able to pick something that excites you enough that you can breathe it every day.

You can't make a movie about making movies - it's boring.

I think 'Chef' is about somebody who's in the middle of his life, and he's kind of lost his passion and his voice, so he seeks out some refinement and redemption.

Movies like 'Chef' are not really box-office monsters in the summertime and don't really fit into Hollywood's business model any longer. Even if 'Chef' is successful, it will be successful in the context of what it is. There's a limited upside to a film that's so small, but there's also limited exposure for the people who backed me.

When it comes to celebrities and tabloids, to me that is a bummer. That's a little disappointing. And it is amazing how things really get made. I always used to think that where there is smoke there is fire, and now I see stories pop up out of nowhere with no basis in reality.

You don't get to see your family much. In the movie business, directors often go out of town for long periods of time, and even if you're in town, you're working 14-15 hour days. People tend to not balance out the important things in their lives with their career.

If you look at the mythology of aliens, there's a lot about gold. It's about them coming for gold; whether that's a simplification or not. If you think of 'Chariot of the Gods,' there's this reoccurring theme of gold.

There's a nostalgic aspect to the 'Iron Man' franchise for me.

I've been in the service industry. I've bar-tended. I've waited tables, and I've worked at pizza places; I've made pizza. I've had a lot of jobs, and many of them were in the food service industry.

Ever since I read 'Kitchen Confidential,' I saw a little light bulb go off. Being a chef is like being on a pirate ship; it's not like 'Who Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe?' or whatever my impression was as I was growing up.

Hopefully we'll figure out how to get 'Iron Man 2' going, and I'll be involved with that. You have got to outdo what you did before. So, if the last one took two years, we would need at least that to do what we are talking about or, at least, thinking about.

I think what's fun about the Western genre is the character arcs are very strong and, arguably, more interesting and exciting than the action that is metaphorically representational of those arcs.

For something to be profitable doesn't necessarily mean it's the best thing in the world for the director. You judge a movie by different standards - I've worked on comedies, and now I've worked on superhero movies, and the reviews are almost parenthetical in both of those genres.

When you're going for a big studio comedy, the joke tally better be pretty high, and you better have some big comedy set pieces. That was one of the issues when I was trying to get 'Swingers' made for the first time, which is that there weren't any broad comedy set pieces.

I can't begin to tell you how fulfilling the perennial nature of 'Elf' on television has been for me. It's great to be able to connect parents with children both emotionally and through humor.

There's a lot of real estate in our brain dedicated to facial recognition and to physics. That takes a lot of processing power out of our brain.

I wanted to be a New York City firefighter. I didn't make it in, though.

Unfortunately, we are not painters and authors, where we can do something in isolation. We require a lot of money to create what we create. It's almost like being an architect: You can't be an architect and build whatever buildings you want to.