Believe me I’m still sorting that out in my head. There was a period for about two months after the movie came out, where I was, I’d hesitate to say the word ‘depressed’, but I was in a fucking funk. Because we should have done better, that movie easily should have done double what it did. Don’t get me wrong, I’m thankful we didn’t do Gigli business. The fact that we were able to do 25 million bucks after Gigli is pretty fucking great. However, that movie should easily have been able to make $50 Million, it should have done Uptown Girls business or Raising Helen business. The fact that we did $25 Million, definitely Gigli had an effect. In that period when I was in a funk, I wanted to find someone to blame, because I know I did my job… Even if you read the reviews it wasn’t like everyone was saying ‘Oh this movie blows, because fucking Bennifer is in it.’ A lot of people were just like ‘this movie blows and this dude has no business making this movie.’ All those critics who smashed this film were really hardcore supporters of my first five movies, and then interestingly enough all the people who hated the first five movies I did loved this movie.

What are you working on next?

Next up, I’ve still got to finish the script for the Green Hornet movie. I don’t think I’m going to direct, I’m just writing it. Then I’m going to do that $250,000 movie I was talking about. Ten years in, the thing I start thinking about is: what I do doesn’t require a lot of money, like the kind of movies I like to make. It’s this (gestures to the interview), just put a camera onto this shit and let it roll. I just like fucking talking movies. Talk is cheap and shooting talk is cheap. I don’t know, for me, I’d just like to make movies that are cheaper than what we got used to. Like Jersey Girl, I love that film to death, man, but there’s no reason that movie should have cost thirty five million bucks. You can’t even go, ‘Well Ben got paid $10 million, and Jen got $21 million’, because you’re still at a $21 million dollar movie. There’s no way that movie needed to cost twenty one fucking million dollars. So I’m trying to reign my shit in, be more in control of it. Not listen to people go, ‘Well, this should be your budget’. Because it’s not necessary.