You can’t take everything on. That’s why when people ask how does this film fit into my oeuvre. I say 'I don’t know. I don’t think in those terms’. If I did, I might become incapacitated by fear . . . How do you eat a whale? One bite at a time. How do you shoot a 150-day movie? You shoot it one day at a time.

People will say, 'There are a million ways to shoot a scene,' but I don't think so. I think there are two, maybe. And the other one is wrong.

I don't have the Tom Hanks fans. When you make the kind of movies I make, you get weird letters from people.

For me, the scariest thing about a serial killer is that there's somebody who lives next door to you, running power tools late into the night, and you don't know he has a refrigerator full of penises.

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.

It's a bad day when you don't get the work done that you need to get done or you don't get it done to the satisfaction.