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.

The Zionist Tulsa Jew who's pugnacious is a reality. I grew up around it. And I think it's really, really funny and surprising and unlikely.

You're always choosing the start point and the end point. And almost by definition, the most interesting period is where something happens, as a result of which something is different at the end. And so to me, the idea that you know everything about a character at the beginning is sort of ridiculous. Something has to be revealed. I like it when the deeper you go with the character, the more you see the layers start to peel away. It's more challenging to me, but it's also just interesting. Those are the things I like to watch. I like to watch the evolutions of something.

I grow tired of intelligence having such a limited manifestation in movies - "intelligence" usually meaning coastal, with a certain level of formal education.

I like to get into a lot of things besides movies. I've been very involved with a few specific efforts. We built this park in New York and it's been a very successful project... I worked on a conservation project in East Africa... Too much of this type of stuff can get you wrapped up in your own work and I love it.

I've always thought of acting as more of an exercise in empathy, which is not to be confused with sympathy. You're trying to get inside a certain emotional reality or motivational reality and try to figure out what that's about so you can represent it.

I have this embedded faith in the process through which films of a certain type get discovered on longer timelines.