Emotions serve characters' purposes. That is their motivation.

There's a certain time in the core of making a movie from pre-production to halfway through post-production I don't read any project, my agent will tell people that "he's not reading." And then when I know how the movie's probably gonna work halfway into post-production, I'll come along.

On a Chinese film you just give orders, no one questions you. Here, you have to convince people, you have to tell them why you want to do it a certain way, and they argue with you. Democracy.

I think that at heart I am an old-fashioned Chinese, really I am.

In the past I've made movies that were pretty universally liked. You can't really hate them. You can discard them, but you can't really hate them.

I think for most people, the audience probably couldn't tell the difference, but I know they [shots of visual effects] can be better. And the people working know they can be more precise. I'm still doing another round of sound mixing and color timing, pretty technical stuff. I think the movie [Life of Pi] is really presentable, nothing was left out that would take you out of the movie. I just need to perfect the job and I still have two weeks to go [to deliver final cut to Fox].

Making movies is a way of understanding myself and the world.