We didn't have much money growing up, so we hopped around L.A. a lot in the '70s, '80s and '90s. I'm very familiar with the shifting culture there.

If I were to do a movie about Apollo 13, I'd be at NASA studying what it took to go into space. It's part of your job to go deep, to interview the right people.

My parents separated when I was 2, and my dad always lived in Chicago and my mother in L.A. I'd go back and forth and sometimes spend the summer with my dad, but L.A. was home.

I love a challenge. So when I did 'Friday,' I didn't want to do another comedy back-to-back. With 'Set It Off,' that was a little different from 'The Negotiator' and 'The Italian Job.' So for me, it's all about challenge. It's all about challenge and about just learning.

It's almost like living a double life where I'm in a limbo space where Amanda Knox, a real person, exists, 'Foxy Knoxy,' an idea of a person, exists, and I'm constantly having to juggle how someone is interacting with me based upon that two-dimensional person of me that has been in the public's imagination for so long.

It occurred to me that every work of art is a synecdoche, there's no way around it. Every creative work that someone does can only represent an aspect of the whole of something. I can't think of an exception to that.

In every work of art the subject is primordial, whether the artist knows it or not. The measure of the formal qualities is only a sign of the measure of the artist's obsession with his subject; the form is always in proportion to the obsession.

Everyone else thinks I'm a nonfiction writer. I think it's because my nonfiction is easier to find. But I write both in equal measure. I love writing fiction because I can totally lose myself, and I get to make up the rules of the world that I'm writing.