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.

As a director, your job is to make sure no one for any reason is taken out of the film. Sometimes it's impossible and sometimes things don't come out the way you want them to, but I think you have to work really hard at making the world engrossing and details are a major part of that.

When you know you have a certain amount of work to finish, you just don't allow yourself to get sick again.

I think that one of the most exciting things about making films is the sort of reaching out to the world. It's as an ambassador. You realize the more you travel that you are a cultural ambassador for your own country. You never become more patriotic than you do living abroad.

I've been wanting to make a movie about the war in Sierra Leone, specifically, for more than 15 years.

Living in New York, I get excited by the idea of working in a different medium. And it's pretty frightening because whatever skills it takes to make a good piece of theater seem mysterious to me right now.

In snowboarding, you're constantly aware that people are so technically brilliant at what they do, and you feel like, "Ugh, I'll never be able to do that."