LOS ANGELES—When a director has jumped from romantic comedies featuring urban barbers and taxi drivers to megabudget comic-book movies, one would assume it would be difficult for him to get back to his more humble beginnings.

Tim Story launched his directing career with Barbershop, a movie about the characters who live and work in an African-American neighbourhood. He followed it up with Taxi, which starred Queen Latifah as a foul-mouthed taxi driver. Within weeks of that film’s release, he found himself in Vancouver on the set of the film adaptation of Marvel Comics’ Fantastic Four. He also directed that movie’s sequel, Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer. The combined budgets of the two films was $230 million.

Story did a small drama called Hurricane Season after Silver Surfer wrapped then took a hiatus before going back to familiar territory. In Think Like a Man, which opens next Friday (April 20), a group of 30ish African Americans (and a white boyfriend played by Entourage’s Jerry Ferrara) feud over a book that tells women how to think like men.

In an L.A. hotel room, Story says he felt that after three years away from directing it was time to start looking for scripts that told stories he could relate to. The only problem was that the people who make comedies set in urban communities assumed he had moved on and wasn’t coming back.

“I read the script and sought out [producer] Will Packer,” Story says. “I said, 'You have to sit down with me.’ What is interesting about my career is that when you have done the Fantastic Four movies and this and that, people don’t think you want to do these little movies. So I am going, 'This is where I started.’ People are saying, 'He is doing those big movies; he doesn’t want to do a $12-million movie.’ It’s an assumption, but you have to tell your agents and say you want to do them. Will said, 'Really, you want to do this?’ and I said, 'Are you kidding? This is home. I will always come back to this genre because I just love it.’ I am happy to be back.”

Although the size of the budget might vary, Story says his approach to the work is always the same. He says that no matter who he is working with or how much money is being spent, he always assumes that he should get out of the way and let actors act. “When you have good actors, you are all telling the same story; you just let them play. I like to be as little in their way as possible. I don’t say 'Cut’ and I don’t like to say 'Action’ because as soon as you yell 'Cut’, someone moves in to fix the hair and there is a relaxing that happens. I don’t like the relaxing. When you see an actor get into it, I really like to let him go and be less intrusive.”

Watch the trailer for Think Like a Man.