C.K. has directed numerous television episodes and stand-up comedy specials since 2001’s Pootie Tang, which starred Chris Rock, Wanda Sykes, and Lance Crouther as the title character, but never returned to feature filmmaking. “There’s a lot in that movie I love,” C.K. told The AV Club in 2004. “It makes me happy that a world I created and wrote and shot made people happy and then lived on. After all, there aren’t many other movies from that year that people still want to see now. But still, there’s some regret as to how it came out, and things like that. It was worth it, though, because it was probably the most significant education of all the surviving-failure lessons I’ve gotten. Also, I think the success it’s had proves that there’s a little more to what I was saying than they thought. I think that if they had let me have even a little more freedom, it could have been more of a success.”