'Funny Games' was conceived as a provocation. My other films are different. If people feel my other films are, or respond to them as provocation, then that's quite different. 'Funny Games' is the only one of mine where my intention was to provoke the audience.

When I first envisioned 'Funny Games' in the mid-1990s, it was my intention to have an American audience watch the movie. It is a reaction to a certain American cinema, its violence, its naivety, the way American cinema toys with human beings. In many American films, violence is made consumable.

I have an inability to enjoy things, but that's why we're in comedy. If we were happy, we wouldn't be funny, I guess.

For years, it's driven me crazy that women don't have better roles, especially in comedies. I know so many funny women but I always felt... misogynist streak is too strong a term - but a dismissiveness.

I love funny people, and when I'm with funny people, or people who are amusing in their weirdness, I love it. Because that to me is funny, as opposed to someone who stops and says, 'Hey let me tell you a joke.'

What's so great about working with really funny women is that vanity comes second. Whatever makes it real and funny, they're going to go for, and it's just great.

What I don't like is when I see stuff that I know has had a lot of improv done or is playing around where there's no purpose to the scene other than to just be funny. What you don't want is funny scene, funny scene, funny scene, and now here's the epiphany scene and then the movie's over.

Women's humor seems to be a little more supportive. It's just kind of trying to make the other one laugh through funny voices and kind of talking about other people. I respond to that. I feel less like I'm going to get beat up in a room full of women than I do in a room full of guys.

It's funny when people say you have sex appeal or call you the next Brad Pitt. I just laugh. I'm not that. I don't want to be that.

By no means do I want to be a piece of meat for the rest of my career. It's funny when you get asked to do a talk show, and then they follow it up with requesting you take your shirt off.