Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side, kid.

The thing I always guard against when I'm talking to people I'm working with about a script is that there's a thing I don't like and it's called "talk story." It's when you're talking about the story; the characters are tasked with talking about the story instead of allowing the audience to experience the story.

I have the ordinary experience of having the blender bottom come off in my room upstairs. I have the ordinary experience of being anonymous when I'm in an airplane talking to air-traffic control, and they don't know who they're talking to. I have a lot of common experiences. What's important is to be able to see yourself, as having commonality with other people and not determine, because of your good luck, that everybody is less significant, less interesting, less important than you are.

When we protect the places where the processes of life can flourish, we strengthen not only the future of medicine, agriculture and industry, but also the essential conditions for peace and prosperity.

I wanted to be a forest ranger or a coal man. At a very early age, I knew I didn't want to do what my dad did, which was work in an office.

I don't think I've mastered anything. I'm still wrestling with the same frustrations, the same issues, the same problems as I always did. That's what life is like.

The capacity to create [visual] effects in the computer has made the job easier, but it has also introduced the complexity that you can with a few more keystrokes generate such a busy canvas that the eye doesn't know where to go. You lose human scale on an event and you're just wowed by the kinetics and the visualization. But, often in those cases I feel you lose touch with the human characters and what it is that they would feel and how they might feel, and that's still the most important part.