One could spend a lot of time picking out the homages to cheeseball classics in Anchorman. Most notably, the fight downtown between the various local stations' on-air guys.

That's definitely Planet of the Apes. That was where the net came from... but we really wanted to see Steve Carell as Brick throw a trident. [laughs] The guys on horseback were Planet of the Apes. And West Side Story makes it in there.

And next thing you know, you're working with Maggie Gyllenhaal and Dustin Hoffman, and getting a Golden Globe nomination, in a highly intellectual piece called Stranger Than Fiction.

Dustin was the nicest guy and still so energetic. The first day, there's a walk-and-talk thing in a gym, and he had all the dialogue; I'm just going, "Well, yes." And he did the first take of it, and he turned to me and said, "How was that? Was it okay? I can do better." I said, "No, it seemed good. It seemed really good." But it was so sweet that he let me in, in that way.

The stakes were also pretty high playing the woody character in Melinda and Melinda.

That was either the blessing or the curse of doing that movie in a way. It was obviously written in his voice, and I wanted to try to make it my own too, and yet, it's hard to not fall into his rhythms when you do that. I was happy to see the few [reviews] that I ever even look at didn't beat me up for being a poor man's Woody Allen, you know?

A better reception than Bewitched got.

Not to say it's a perfect movie by any means, but it's definitely not as bad as what it got beat up for. I loved doing it, but for whatever reasons, it became the poster child that summer for Hollywood's inability to have original ideas.