As a kid, I was always building things. My father had a shop in the house, and we built things - we were kind of a project family. I started out as a painter, and then painting led to cinema, and in cinema, you get to build so many things, or help build them.

When I was little in Spokane, Washington I drew all the time... and my father would bring paper home... and I mostly drew browning automatic water-cooled sub-machine guns... that was my favorite.

A filmmaker doesn't have to suffer to show suffering. You just have to understand it. You don't have to die to shoot a death scene.

You get all the puzzle parts together enough to say the puzzle is complete. It's a script. In the process of realizing that, new ideas can come, one way or another. Through a happy accident, they just come to you.

Films are 50 percent visual and 50 percent sound. Sometimes sound even overplays the visual.

I would rather not make a film than make one where I don't have final cut.

I was creative before I started meditating, but I had, looking back, a weakness. I wasn't self-assured. I had a little bit of melancholy. I had a lot of anger for my situations in life, and I would take this out on my first wife.