Comedians like Adam are good at thinking on their feet, so they're always coming up with new jokes. He loves to hear ideas and he usually takes them and comes up with something even better. It's fun to throw stuff at Adam, because he runs with it so that every take is different.

Will Shortz finally saw the film after we had submitted it to Sundance on the last day of submission. We received an e-mail from him in October: ?¢¬Ä¬úI just watched “Wordplay,?¢¬Ä and I am totally blown away by what you have made. I absolutely love it.?¢¬Ä

Cannes Film Fest 2006–I wanted an icon of the All-American male in a crisis situation. Brad Pitt wasn't an obvious choice for the part, but a very interesting one, because he hasn't done this type of role. It was exciting to watch him transform into a middle-aged man faced with trouble in a Muslim country.

Cannes Film Fest 2006–I wouldn't call my film anti-British. I'd encourage people to see their loyalties horizontally across national boundaries, so that this isn't a film about the Brits bashing the Irish. We have a responsibility to attack the mistakes and brutalities of our leaders, past and present. Far from being anti-

I knew that Charlotte Rampling would bring huge scope to the combination of attractiveness, unsettling strangeness, and distress that make up the part of Alice, a woman in deep personal crisis.