Jeff Baena

“'Motherwort.' 'Great Leopard's Bane.' These are awesome band names.”

“I always knew I wanted to make movies since I was around eleven. I never thought of it as wanting to do straight-up comedy. Even now, I don't see things in terms of genre.”

“I don't know if it's because my sensitivity is through the roof, but I can't stand contrived dialogue anymore.”

“I was reading a lot of Jacques Derrida at the time, writing 'Beth.' He actually talked about zombies.”

“I don't try to make actors play crazy characters. I like where there's a certain element of who they are and truth to their performances.”

“Everything kind of has a message in it.”

“In my mind, if you went back to the Middle Ages, in Italy they'd be speaking Middle Age Italian. And at that point, it would obviously be indecipherable for us, but for the people of that time, it was just normal talking.”

“I usually just do, like, studio jobs, re-writes and stuff.”

“If something's really selfless, then there's really no value in it for you... there's only value in it for the world.”

“Having been through breakups when you get back with the person thinking it's going to work the second time - it never does.”

“It's so rare when marketing and press doesn't ruin your movie.”

“I think there are a lot of actors who are excellent at cold reads, and they go to an audition, and they read the part and nail it, but then when it comes to the performance, they don't have something.”

“Not to be negative, but I think the biggest lesson is don't trust anyone.”

“I know, when I was in film school, some of my films were silly, but a lot of them were more dramatic. I don't think I intentionally set out to do comedy stuff. I guess that's a consequence of coming up working with David O. Russell and skewing toward those sensibilities.”

“Aubrey Plaza is absolutely amazing.”

“I'm just trying to get an exposure and make my day.”

“I think one of the bigger issues with modern-day people is that we don't give enough credit to people from history as being real. We almost treat them as these rarified beings that didn't exist the way that we do with emotions and urges and drives.”

“You show a movie to your friends when you're working on it, but you don't have any real objectivity. You just don't know. So that moment when it's shown for the very first time at Sundance, it's just terrifying. I'm so anxious. And then every screening is different.”

“People were always like, 'Oh my God, you're going to be working with your girlfriend? Are you freaking out? Is that going to, like, destroy your relationship?' I think it emboldened the relationship.”

“One of the interesting things about the 'Decameron' itself was it was written in the Florentine dialect as opposed to the Latin vernacular - and that was mainly to have it be a piece of literature for the people as supposed to some kind of highfalutin' canon.”