Everyone wants to be loved; everyone wants to know where they're going in life; everyone wants to have a sense of direction and feel the next day is going to be better than today. We just all deal with it in a different way.

I don't want to make films that give you the answer. If there is a message to my films - and I hope there isn't - it's to be open-minded.

And over the course of the last six years, as I've directed more features and commercials, I've become better at articulating exactly how I want the audience to feel.

Filmmaking is a completely imperfect art form that takes years and, over those years, the movie tells you what it is. Mistakes happen, accidents happen and true great films are the results of those mistakes and the decisions that those directors make during those moments.

My writing voice is very much like 'Thank You for Smoking.' It's a guy's voice. It's very masculine.

I used to have a group called Bad-Movie Saturday. Every Saturday, six of us would go see the worst movie that came out each weekend. It'd be noon in Burbank. It was just a running commentary. All executives - we would each talk through the movie and make jokes.

Directing is a reactionary job more than a creation job. The job is to react whether it's moment one, the first time you read the script or see an article or read a book or notice something happen on the street and have an idea for a movie, and it just continues from there on in. You're just reacting to dialogue, a performance, an audition, a headache, a piece of furniture, a piece of clothing.