Michael Mann

There's a tired notion that the photojournalist has to be disengaged to be able to shoot what he shoots, and that's such a cliched idea of what the experience is. Of course they're engaged, and they're not distanced.

Everything we do on 'Luck' is absolutely no different than if we'd had been doing it in a feature film. There's no short cuts. The specificity of what every single line might mean. Everything Dustin Hoffman does. Kevin Dunn is as authentic in the last scene of the last episode as he is in the first scene of the first episode.

The historical novelist has to consider what has actually happened, while the SF writer is dealing in possibilities, but they are both in the business of imagining a world unlike our own and yet connected to it.

Boxing is like chess. You encourage your opponent to make mistakes so you can capitalise on it. People think you get in the ring and see the red mist, but it's not about aggression. Avoiding getting knocked out is tactical.

The great joy of doing 'The Daily Show' for me is that I get to sit on the fence between cultures. I am commenting on the absurdity of both sides as an outsider and insider. Sometimes I'm playing the brown guy, and sometimes I'm not, but the best stuff I do always goes back to being a brown kid in a white world.