The truth of the matter is the real story are the people who rise above all of this incredible cruelty. Otherwise that cruelty wins.

Honestly, as you can imagine, it really isn't all that fun directing yourself, running back and forth to the monitors to see if you're terrible or not.

At some point in our lifetime, gay marriage won't be an issue, and everyone who stood against this civil right will look as outdated as George Wallace standing on the school steps keeping James Hood from entering the University of Alabama because he was black.

I find that it's a very odd thing to think of competition when you're talking about what I still think of as art. I don't think of competing with actors or filmmakers at all. You do compete, in a way, at the box office, but we're far enough apart when both films are coming out that I'm not concerned with that either.

I've certainly done some turkeys along the way and made some dumb choices in my career, mostly early on. I'm one of the lucky ones who got to make a lot of mistakes very early when no one was paying attention.

I was very lucky to get well known much later in life. You need to have flopped quite a few times to get a sense of how little any of it has to do with you.

In 2003 I was saying, where are the ties [between Iraq] and al-Qaida? Where are the ties to 9/11? I knew it; where the f**k were these Democrats who said, 'We were misled'? That's the kind of thing that drives me crazy: 'We were misled.' F**k you, you weren't misled. You were afraid of being called unpatriotic.