The worst thing for people to say about your movies is, "Yeah, it was pretty good, but it was too damn long.".

I like actors who, when you see them on screen, you sense a person, not just an actor.

I like action films, not exclusively, but I like Samurai films. I like Westerns. Not so much war pictures, but a few. I like kinetic cinema.

Whenever I'm asked about independent cinema, I think of what Fidel Castro said during the Cold War about the league of non-aligned nations. He said that really, there were only two non-aligned nations: the U.S. and the USSR. The rest of us have to be aligned somewhere. I say similarly, in a way, Paramount, Sony, and Warner Bros. are the only true independents, because they're the only ones who can do whatever they want and have distribution for their films built in.

All three parts of filmmaking [writing, shooting, editing] contribute to rhytm. You want the script to be a tight as possible, you want the acting to be as efficient as possible on the set, and you have enough coverage to manipulate the rhythm in the editing room, and then in the editing room you want to find the quickest possible version, even if it's a leisurely paced film. I definitely in filmmaking more and more find writing and directing a means to harvest material for editing. It's all about editing.

I read reviews of critics I respect and feel I can learn something from. Right now there are a lot of bottom-feeder critics who just have access to a computer and don't necessarily have an academic or cinema background that I can detect, so I tend to ignore that and stay with the same top-tier critics that I've come to respect. I like reading a good review - it doesn't have to be favorable, but a well-thought-out one - because I very much appreciate the relationship of directors and critics.

A pitfall of making a comedy with a studio-and it's also an American cultural thing-is that I get tired of being encouraged to go always for laughs.