A huge problem in movies or with people who work on movies is that two people can look at the same thing but they don't necessarily see the same thing.

Grips and electricians have done more to help me shoot good movies than any other craft.

Good films are not made by accident, nor is good photography. You can have good things happen, on occasion, by accident that can be applied at that moment in a film, but your craft isn't structured around such things, except in beer commercials.

Complexity is not good. People don't understand the elegance of simplicity.

I don't really like directing. I've had a good relationship with actors, but I can do what I do and back off. I don't want that much romancing. I don't want them to call me up at two in the morning saying, 'I don't know who I am.

If you take a sophisticated idea, reduce it to the simplest possible terms so that it’s accessible to everybody, and don’t get simple mixed up with simplistic, it’s how you mount and present something that makes it engaging.

The lack of perfection, that's the hardest quality of all, because you're fighting your instincts. You're trained to want to do things perfectly.