Don't get seduced by your own stuff; work hard to keep a blank slate state of mind each time you watch your film.

It's important for me to have hope because that's my job as a parent, to have hope, for my kids, that we're not going to leave them in a world that's in shambles, that's a chaotic place, that's a dangerous place.

Failure is an option, fear is not.

The magic doesn't come from within the director's mind, it comes from within the hearts of the actors.

The films that influenced me were so disparate that there's almost no pattern.

I think people had somehow gotten the sense that we have explored everything, when that isn't the case. We so know so little about the ocean, and so much of it is being destroyed.

Don't get seduced by your own stuff. Don't get high on your own supply. The hardest thing as a filmmaker is when you're watching a film that you've worked on for several years. You know every frame so intimately that holding lots of the objectivity of a new viewer who has just seen it for the first time is the hardest thing. Every aesthetic decision you make - and you make thousands of them every day, have to - in theory, must be done from you being a blank slate. You almost have to run a program, like a mind wipe, every time you watch the movie.