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.

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

Action is a way of externalizing an emotional state. You might not be running, leaping, climbing and doing all that. But, the way you create that emotional state in a movie is by having the characters have physical jeopardy that they have to work against.

You're so stupid, Rose!

Writing a screenplay, for me, is like juggling. It's like, how many balls can you get in the air at once? All those ideas have to float out there to a certain point, and then they'll crystallize into a pattern.

There seems to be a lot of excitement around something that, to me, is a yawn, frankly.

It took me a long time to realize that you have to have a bit of an interlanguage with actors. You have to give them something that they can act with.