I was seeing a lot of really good things about Get Shorty when it came out, and my wife pointed out that if you validate the good reviews, you also have to validate the bad reviews.

It felt scary because there was no auditioning, no rehearsing.

I'm not the one or two take guy, but I'm not the 20, 30, 50, 70 take guy either. If I do a bunch of takes, like more than five or six, it's usually for some technical reasons.

I'm an unusual director in that my cut is usually shorter then the final released film. I like short films.

By definition a sequel can't be original. So you've got to figure out what worked the first time around.

When I move from being a cameraman to being a director I looked at a lot of other cameramen who tried to make the move. And in each case they moved up their camera operator to be the DP, which really meant they didn't want to give up being the DP, and really wanted to do both. And my feeling was if I was going to succeed as a director, I had to just be a director and give up the safety net of being a cameraman.

These movies are like my kids. I just love them to death. Some of them go to Harvard and some of them can barely graduate high school.