I guess bittersweet is probably my favorite tone, as a lover of Woody Allen and Federico Fellini and the French New Wave. You know, old Hollywood, sad movies. I guess it's my picture of suburban life, a lot of it being very, very lonely. I wanted to have that infused into the feeling of it.

It actually took me 20 years to want to write about my youth. I was definitely always a little intimidated about writing about that part of my life.

I don't see that many movies where people are depicting middle-class suburban life in a more textured way. My feelings about the suburbs are not so wonderful, so my movies tend to be a little melancholy.

We didn't want to make it a parody of Don Draper[in Keeping Up With the Joneses] but we did arrive on this idea that there's a side of Jon Hamm that opens up that would like him to stop living as a professional liar.

Even the mistakes and the pain that you've caused and enacted upon you. That is definitely what I'm trying to capture

I've been co-writing a TV thing with Bryan Cranston, which we are going to find out soon if it's moving forward or not which is for Amazon.

Jon Hamm was the first I thought of for the other role in [Keeping Up with the Joneses], I recently worked with him on Clear History, an HBO improv movie that we had done together.

I feel like I came from a generation where... We didn't have Vietnam. We didn't have World War II. Nothing cultural was thrust upon us to make men out of us, so you're kind of free to not grow up that way if you don't want to.

Jon Hamm is incredibly good at playing people who have secrets and are hiding aspects of their personality, and obviously Don Draper had a lot of that.

I feel this way about a lot of movies, that the characters are idealized versions of people. For better or worse, I am as fascinated with human flaws as anything.

Isla [Fisher] is so pretty we were trying to decide who the hell should play against her that would intimidate her, and one day I said, You know...this was before Superman had come out, Superman v. Batman: The Court Room Drama I like to call it.

Superman and Batman go to a small claims court together. I knew they'd cast [Gal Gadot], I had seen pictures of her, I remembered seeing her doing parts in movies and I went and re-watched stuff with hers and then met with her.

[Keeping Up with the Joneses] is not one of those movies where people get shot and fall down and there's no reality of what would happen if you got shot and knocked over a motorcycle. It's meant to be a slight comedy in that sense.

I think Stanley Tucci was having an affair with his mother. He had this odd quality that I haven't seen him ever get to do again in a movie that just made me think he's got some chops. He's got a strangeness to him, but he's also clearly been stuck in this role because of his looks and his type. He's been really pigeonholed, I felt.

Brian Eno records and music became a huge obsession of mine in college, in a way that a pop song can provide solace. I don't know if it's shallow or silly, but it meant so much to me.

I lived on Thompson Street in SoHo for 13 years and I watched it go from a little Italian neighborhood to the Mall Of America. Then the obvious fact that it's pre-Internet, pre-cell phone. Everyone I think thinks their youth is a more innocent time. I just don't know.

My first love will always be movies.

One of the dangers of making a movie about young people is it's potentially trite.