Movies are the biggest export in the world, the biggest American export. It influences people all over the world.

My mom had me when she was 16, and I was an only child, which is probably why I received a lot of love and didn't miss that my father wasn't around.

Producing is making films without having to work sometimes. It's still making films, but it's a different job.

When I do short films, I try to do something completely out of my comfort zone, out of my element.

When you're fearless, you take more risks because you're less conscious of failure or what can go wrong.

When you're the director, you kinda do all the work.

Woody Allen is in his '70s and he's making movies, so I look forward to getting there.

You can't show a four-hour movie in a theater, really.

At the end of the day, audiences just want to laugh and be entertained. They want to escape from their reality, and that's why we make movies, to get people to escape from the realities.

Do I have a small movie in me? Yeah, probably, when I'm 60. But I'm not Hal Ashby, I'm not Roman Polanski. I'm true to myself. Whether you like it or not.

I learn more from the audience than I can from anybody else. Not from what they write on the scorecards, but how they respond to the movie while they're watching it - where they laugh and where they react.

I went to a public high school and most of the comedy was coming from the black kids and the Asian kids and the Hispanic kids. And, the coolest kids to me where always the black kids. They were always fashion forward and they always dressed the coolest. They were always the best dancers, and just the coolest people.

I'm not invited to the Vanity Fair dinner where they watch the Oscars - or even the Oscars themselves - so I sit at home and watch it with a bunch of close friends.

I'm not tied to budgets. I'm tied to the story that I want to tell, and how much it's going to cost is up to whatever the economic situation of the studio is.

Miami Beach - that's where I grew up, in a middle-class Jewish family led by my maternal grandfather. Me, my great-grandmother - a Holocaust survivor, who was my roommate - my grandparents, my mom and her brother all shared a four-bedroom house.

People can criticise all day long, I think I've proven myself, I think I deliver. And I agree, box office does not mean a movie's good, but I feel like I'm making good movies and I'm delivering in box office.

They say your childhood influences your tastes and interests, or your approach if you're an artist. So what you create, whatever you saw, whatever your childhood was like - it influences how you're going to end up.

When I was 13, Eddie Murphy was to me what Chris Tucker was to 13-year-olds when I made 'Rush Hour.' And 'Rush Hour' really came out of the fact that I grew up watching 'Beverly Hills Cop' and '48 Hrs.'

'Vacation' means titillating my taste buds.

Before I did 'Rush Hour,' I was a big fan of Jackie Chan movies and I had seen all of them.