Awards movies are normally sort of... life-affirming and noble. It's probably too much of an intellectual conceit and, you know, people don't like it when you don't lead the bad guy off in cuffs.

Our Pavlovian response to movies has gotten to its lowest point ever. You look at a lot of movies that are successful and a lot of movies that studios hold up as examples and you go, 'My God, that isn't even a story. It isn't even two acts. It's eight set pieces drawn out with slow motion.' The difficulty for me was that you had to hope that people were interested in this kind of a story.

I learned just to be a belligerent asshole, which was really: "You have to get what you need to get out of it." You have to fight for things you believe in, and you have to be smart about how you position it so that you don't just become white noise.

Everything seems really simple on paper until you take a camera out of the box.

The thing I always say to any writer that I'm working with is: Just make sure that in any argument, EVERYONE is right. I want every single person arguing a righteous side of the argument. That makes interesting drama.

Perfume is pretty good because nobody has to hold the product by their face or use it.

I thought that the behavioral and some of the profiling stuff was interesting. The thing that I was most interested in, and the thing that we were really adament about, was let's get these guys who were there on tape, or in some kind of way, telling what happened. No one has really talked to them all.