You need peers; you need people who are at the same level you are. You never know in life when you're going to need help, and you never know who you're going to need it from.

Success is when you try to achieve your inward vision externally and have it come off the way you see it. Then YOU feel successful about it; that's how success is measured.

You try to get yourself into a situation where you only have to answer to yourself, where you can ask advice of people and work with your peers and mentors and things to try to do the best job that you can possibly do.

I think that's an obligation you have, to give back no matter what happens. It actually ends up being easier when you're young than when you become successful. Suddenly you realize you've gone into a whole other realm of philanthropy, from just being a volunteer to being this person that dedicates buildings and saves lots of children in some faraway place.

There are a lot of movies that are badly made that I love, and there are a lot of movies that are just beautifully made but I don't like them. And critics have a tendency - that's all they focus on, which is, "I like it. I don't like it. It's good. It's bad."

The first movies, they just put up a camera and had a train come into a train station, and everybody was amazed. That was sort of all technology.

One of the most telling things about film school is you've got a lot of students wandering around saying, "Oh, I wish I could make a movie. I wish I could make a movie."