I love crosscut parallel storytelling, like we did in Blue Valentine. I love how Alejandro González Iñárritu has done it, and Quentin Tarantino, and Francis Ford Coppola, and all the way back to D.W. Griffith - this parallel editing is an effective way to tell stories. It's like juggling, like keeping a lot of balls in the air and seeing how they come down.

There's one rule that I have on my movies, which is that anything that you want to do, you can do. But! There's a flip side to that, which is that anything I want you to do, give it a try also.

I don't really collect anything. I grew up in a family that collected things and then they'd get sick and people die and then they have their basements full of stuff that goes from one box to the next, so I try not to get sentimental with stuff. I just try to collect memories.

When I made my student film, a feature, nobody wanted to talk to me and I was, like, in the desert for 12 years.

I feel like the job in editing is to let the movie tell you what it is. It's like sculpture. You just start taking away, you add a nose here, you cut off like the side of the cheek over here in the crease and you have a face. But it really reveals to you what it means to be over time, and if you have enough time.

I tell the actors that the biggest gift they can give me is to fail. And that the second gift they can give me is to surprise me.

I want to get out of the way of the actors. I want to get out of their eye lines. I want to them to stop thinking they're making a movie. I want them to just go and live. It's like you take these great actors and put them in an aquarium of life, and just watch them swim. That's what makes editing tough because you get all these beautiful, unplanned moments.