The film has less to do with smoking and more to do with parenting .

I hate movies that tell people what to think. I'm proud that Democrats thought 'Thank You For Smoking' was their film and Republicans thought it was theirs. I'm proud that pro-choice people thought 'Juno' was their film and pro-life people thought it was theirs.

We were sitting there in shock. And I turned to other people who had worked on the film, and we were completely confused. But the audience didn't seem to notice or care.

There were a couple of thousand people who saw the film at Sundance without the Katie Holmes sex scene. I implore all of them to now go back and see the movie with the Katie Holmes sex scene.

And the biggest improvement I see between 'Up in the Air' and 'Juno' and 'Thank You for Smoking' is that 'Up in the Air' deals with the complicated human stuff in a way that my other films have not. It's a more articulated film, and because of that, I'm most proud of it.

Very early on, I decided I didn't want smoking in the movie. It's not really a movie about smoking, but about lobbying. Tobacco is just the setting. It's not that I believe in the idea that movies should be responsible and not show smoking. But I think if the characters had been smoking, it would have seemed a pro-smoking movie, whereas it's about lobbying and spin and talk.