'A Bug's Life' is a really funny movie and the characters have such different personalities. The movie is happy and then gets really sad and I'm like W'hoa I'm feeling this way and this movie is about bugs!'

I love the script and I just thought it was a great role. Like I say it's like this - the script is like this sad funny desperate love song to the lost American man.

Since it's based on my parents it's more emotionally close to me than some of my more surreal plays. And then I like the balance of the comic and the sad. It should play as funny but you should care about the characters and feel sad for them.

The books are funny and sad and that's what people respond to.

Well I did Marlene 15 years ago and that's in the style. It's somehow similar and not similar because Marlene was much more aggressive funny and sad.

My mother and father were very strange people. They tried to be funny which is always very sad to me.

I love the sad songs with their maudlin self-deprecating almost funny lyrics. As an Englishman they make a lot of sense.

Some really good things kind of swing both ways and I like to see people that can swing really really really sad and horrible and terrible and really really really beautiful and funny.

So far at least I haven't found a way to tell my kind of stories without making them both sad and funny.

The reason I turn down 99% of a hundred I mean a thousand scripts is because romantic comedies are often very romantic but seldom very funny.