You know, independent films have been institutionalized, practically. Every studio has got a boutique arthouse label.

Everyone keeps saying the western's dead, but it's not.

There is a lot of interesting product coming to market already. Bags and bottles and cups and such made of potato starch and other fully biodegradable materials. In some sense, plastic is more chemically complex. We ought to be able to simplify.

Instead of telling the world what you're eating for breakfast, you can use social networking to do something that's meaningful.

Everyone thinks that Fight Club is a very important and successful film, but it was a massive box-office failure. Massive. It was a big flop by any commercial-release standard. And it's been a huge hit on DVD. Everything that movie has become has been on DVD. So you can't stake your sense of creative success on this whole box-office-performance matrix, because if you do, you're going to be disappointed most of the time.

I almost forgot what it's like to be proud of my government.

Most of the movies that I've made that I really felt good about and cared about made very little money anyway, so I'm not particularly worried about people downloading and sharing them.