I'm not a celebrity. I'm intentionally and defiantly not a celebrity. I don't have any interest in it. I don't have any talent for it. I keep my personal life out of my public life as cleanly as I can.

People will say things after a screening that it affects them in a certain way, which is why I don't like to explain what certain things are about. I want them to have that. It limits people's ability to understand something if I say it's "about this." That's happened to us a bunch on this.

There really is only one ending to any story. Human life ends in death. Until then, it keeps going and gets complicated and there's loss. Everything involves loss; every relationship ends in one way or another.

Before you start production, you have characters you have created without actors in mind, then all of a sudden you've got actors. They bring an enormous amount in creating these characters, and creating the dynamics between the characters that you've written.

There's a point I can get to where I start writing character and then through the dialogue, after all of this preparation, the thing starts to feel like it's a character developing through the dialogue. A lot of character traits do come from writing dialogue, but I have to be ready to do it.

Failure is a badge of honor. It means you risked failure. And if you don’t risk failure, you’re never going to do anything that’s different from what you’ve already done or what somebody else has done.

There are nearly thirteen million people in the world. None of those people is an extra. They're all the leads of their own stories. They have to be given their due.