I want people to surprise themselves. Instead of saying "Oh, god, didn't we already do this 17 times?"

I do agree you can't just make movies three hours long for no apparent reason. For a romantic comedy to be three hours long, that's longer than most marriages.

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.

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.

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.

My idea of professionalism is probably a lot of people's idea of obsessive.

I was always interested in films that scar.