I think great acting is about inhabiting a skin and transforming yourself.

I feel like, as a filmmaker, I'm at my strongest when I write the script and when it comes from me, out of whole cloth. My best work has always been self-generated.

The most terrifying thing in my life is a blank sheet of paper.

As a writer, you have to be willing to kill your darlings, and I'm a writer first. As a director, I've got no problem cutting the scenes.

The worst pressure is the pressure I put on myself.

I'm a veteran, and I come from a family of veterans and people who served in that war. And the stories that I heard were a hell of a lot different than the movies that I was seeing, so I wanted to make a movie about the people that were really there.

It's important for me to take very famous, well-known people and not have them play themselves and not have them be seen as themselves.