My mom said to me when I was a little kid, "You don't have to hate your job. Just because you see all these unhappy grown-ups doesn't mean you have to be one of them." She said, "Find something that you would do for free and find a way to get paid to do it." That's been my guiding principle.

If it were up to me, every job would be somewhere in Canada.

I'm a chronic ad-libber. So whoever hires me, often to their chagrin, should know that I will be talking a bunch of smack.

People always like to have a good time and laugh, and, [among] the vast majority of the seven billion people on this earth, one thing that we all have in common is at some point we all need to pair up and find some sort of significant other, some sort of romantic counterpart.

I do feel the weight of being the steward of the greatest sport the world ever came up with. I grew up with a love and admiration for it, so I feel an obligation to portray it as electric and terrifying and exciting and beautiful, and all these sometimes contradicting things that make hockey what it is.

Montreal is a great town. There's equal parts blue-collar town.

It's something I want to do going forward - make a movie that is commercial and universal and will play in any movie theater or living room in the States or the UK, but is definitively Canadian. I don't think there's such a thing as prohibitively Canadian.