When a movie comes out, I always go off on a beach so I miss all the craziness that goes on, all the hoopla, and the hype and the success, and how much it's making, or whether it's doing good or whether it's doing bad. I just miss it all. I don't talk to anybody, and a couple weeks later I come back and it's all over with.

You have to find something that you love enough to be able to take risks.

Learning to make films is very easy. Learning what to make films about is very hard. What you’ve really got to do is focus on learning as much about life, and about various aspects of it first.

I haven't met anybody who hasn't been able to describe years and years and years of very, very difficult struggle through the whole process of achieving anything whatsoever. And there's no way to sort of get around that.

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.

Everybody has talent and it's just a matter of moving around until you've discovered what it is. A talent is a combination of something you love a great deal and something you can lose yourself in - something that you can start at 9 o'clock, look up from your work and it's 10 o'clock at night - and also something that you have a talent, not a talent for, but skills that you have a natural ability to do very well. And usually those two things go together.

Sound is 50 percent of the movie going experience, and I've always believed audiences are moved and excited by what they hear in my movies at least as much as by what they see.