I studied French forever, and when do I ever speak French? I clearly should have studied Spanish. I wish I had stuck with music, because that would still be great. I really wish I had learned to surf earlier in my life.

You know when somebody really knows what they're drawing from and you can feel it when you see the movie.

Any questions I had about whether a redneck from Oklahoma could become a Brown Classical Philosophy professor ended when I met Tim [Blake Nelson].

When you're working on a creative thing, everyone has an idea, and they're pushing it. The first time you work with anybody, you have to get comfortable with the way another person pushes hard for what they want. Familiarity breeds contempt, people say. But I've found, for creative things, familiarity breeds peace of mind, because you realize you know someone better. You trust each other. You know not to take things a certain way, or a wrong way. You get to where you don't have to waste quite so much time with diplomacy. Things are a little more efficient.

I read a lot of scripts and so many are clearly a knockoff of one familiar genre or another.

I tend to have a kind of tunnel vision when I'm looking at an individual piece.

You can't control everything that comes to you.