I'd love to be a director-for-hire and get a nice paycheck and captain one of those big ships, but I think studios mistakenly think I want to write what I direct - which I don't. I write out of desperation, because I never get a script I like, other than "Nebraska." It's a matter of: What's the screenplay? Is it intelligent? Is it human? I don't care what genre, what scale. I'm here for the movies.

When you're a houseguest and you leave, it's nice to straighten something up or send your hosts a useful gift. And when you leave the planet, it's nice to have made a positive contribution.

Acting is a lot easier than people think it is.

In the moment of making films, I want to share my observations of life, not of other films.

If you were falling in love and you could go back in time and relive a day and see the banal things you did that you'd forgotten about, you'd weep, looking at that day.

Just because I make films doesn't mean I think they're great. I just make them and then when I'm done with them I'm just a filmgoer like I always am. They're all lessons. I'm still in film school, honestly. And this one is just a dry run for whatever the next one is.

My editor and I remain very disciplined. It's just sometimes when you're making a film, you get into the cutting room and you see a scene that's slowing you down in a certain section, but if you remove that scene then, emotionally or story-wise, another scene a half-hour later won't have the same impact. You just get stuck with it.