With 'Avatar,' I thought, Forget all these chick flicks and do a classic guys' adventure movie, something in the Edgar Rice Burroughs mold, like John Carter of Mars - a soldier goes to Mars.

Everybody is always talking about droughts and sea level rise, but when human civilization, with more crowding and greater resource depletion, is under that much stress, it translates into wars and huge displaced populations. The Syrian refugee crisis is just a first taste of what it's going to be like. I don't want my kids growing up in that kind of world.

My mother was a housewife but she was also an artist. My father was an electrical engineer.

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.

If you set your goals ridiculously high and it's a failure, you will fail above everyone else's success.

I'm certainly not a fan of conversion when you could shoot the movie in 3-D.

It's about human imagination and curiosity. What's out there? What's in the great beyond? What exists at levels we can't see with our five senses?