You're learning the whole time. Halfway through a movie, you've got a lot of ideas, a lot of things that maybe you've learned and that you then wish you could apply, but you can't. You just have to finish the movie in that world that you're in. Maybe what you've learned you can apply somewhere else.

A movie is a diamond and suddenly someone is seeing this facet or that facet. No matter how good you think you are, there's stuff you're not seeing.

I'm married to an artist. I get a lot of inspiration from art, from the lighting in art, from the compositions in art, from the textures, and all of that. I'm always playing with it.

Music in a movie might tell you about longing. It might tell you about fear. It might tell you any number of things, but it tells you something different. Something happy might be going on, but there can be this little sad tinge underneath that tells you something.

You're learning the whole time. Halfway through a movie, you've got a lot of ideas, a lot of things that maybe you've learned and that you then wish you could apply, but you can't. You just have to finish the movie in that world that you're in. Maybe what you've learned you can apply somewhere else.

The day you shoot something, everything changes. You still have the same overall vision and approach. You create a world that you're going to be true to or the film tells you what you're going to do. And so, it's like you've got a philosophy of what you're doing. You try and have that changing texturally over the movie.

You should never settle for what you think is just good. You should drive the editors and writers and everybody nuts until it's great. And if you don't go for great, you won't end up with good. You've got to go beyond your wildest dreams because the exigencies of filmmaking are going to smash you into the ordinary.