Think of my movies as heightening our awareness, not confusing the difference between truth and fiction, but heightening our awareness of how confused we can become about what is real.

Finding truth involves some kind of activity. As I like to point out, truth isn't handed to you on a platter. It's not something that you get at a cafeteria, where they just put it on your plate. It's a search, a quest, an investigation, a continual process of looking at and looking for evidence, trying to figure out what the evidence means.

The smarter people I know declined to watch the most recent debate [with Donald Trump].

I actually like doing commercials. I don't like doing them to the exclusion of everything else, but I like doing them. The 30-second format is very hard. I sometimes call it American Haiku. And I think some of the commercials I've done are not so bad.

There is something about the photographs that is endlessly disturbing. The fact that we like to think of them as torture actually hides what is really deeply offensive about them.

People think in narratives - in beginnings, middles and ends. The danger when you edit something too severely is that it no longer makes sense; worse still, it leaves people with the disquieting impression that something is being hidden.

Ecstatic absurdity: it's the confrontation with meaninglessness.