When you go and you tell a studio and that it's an ensemble, that doesn't mean a lot to them. But, my hats off to Paramount and Warner Brothers, because when we told them that these were the kinds of people that we want to get, across the board, they were unbelieveably enthusiastic about it.

I always say everyone was lucky enough to be in a Cate Blanchett movie.

If you read the good reviews you gotta read the bad reviews. I kind of think of it as like being a quarterback: you get way too much blame when it's bad and way too much credit when it's good.

You have the power to pause stuff and you have the power to go to the bathroom. You can do whatever you want in your own home. It's a much more relaxed thing. It's more like a book, it seems to me. That's kind of the way I watch movies.

What you learn from that first, and I don't call it 'trial by fire,' I call it 'baptism by fire,' is that you are going to have to take all of the responsibility, because basically when it gets right down to it, you are going to get all of the blame, so you might as well have made all of the decisions that led to people either liking it or disliking it. There's nothing worse than hearing somebody say 'Oh, you made that movie? I thought that movie sucked,' and you have to agree with them, you know?

I don't think that digital technology will ever take away the humanity of storytelling, because storytelling is entirely, in and of itself, a wholly human concern.

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.