The romance is essential. I love the love. I don't love just people struggling. I love what people are struggling for. That moves me. I love watching people be loving, and I find it enchanting, magical and transporting. It's one of the reasons that I go to the movies, and that's why I like putting it in movies.

Unhappy endings can be as cheap as happy endings.

It's a closing of the mind that happens when you want to be lazy and go with the easiest answers, like the media do all the time in their sound bytes.

Christianity has been responsible for plenty of horror and death in the world, all supposedly in God's name.

It's easier to control people when they're afraid.

I think what makes compelling fiction or cinema is when you're basically taking the most intense moments of experience and you're creating a song or a narrative out of it.

The great lesson about filmmaking is never take "no" for an answer, especially if you have a lot of passion and inspiration to do something.