Everyone wants to be liked, so of course you want critical acclaim. After that, box office acclaim isn't bad. More than anything I think you have to try and make something you're proud of.

Levity, you need levity to feel anything. You need to laugh before you cry. I think films that take themselves too seriously without any levity are missing an important ingredient to the potential emotional impact of their stories.

I'm pretty hard to impress, and I'm pretty exacting, in terms of what I want from my props department and art department. We spend many, many hours going over visual research and finding the right artists to create the material.

I'm terrible at making titles. I never like the titles of my films.

If you think of most murders as being between people who know each other, it's very easy to figure out who the killer is. But when you have a murder that appears random, where the person is not someone that's within the known radius of the victim, then it's much, much more difficult to solve.

I have aspirations of making a big, historical epic. I don't know if I'll ever get the money to do it.

You only have so much time in life so everything you do needs to mean something to you.