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.

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.

I've never been to Harvard, I've never been to college, so I don't know what dorm life is like.

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.

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.

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.

We live in a silly time, and people go to the movies to see something that they haven't seen before, and you have to promise to show them that. In a horrible way, you have to promise them a special effect.