In the best-case scenario, the audience sees themselves in your shoes. The only way you can do that is if you try to play it as if it was happening to you.

I guess I always have sort of general ideas, but the best stuff would be the stuff that comes to you in the moment, always.

If you know what you want and you hire people that can do it, there's no reason it should be arduous and torturous. I wanted everyone to enjoy themselves on my set and want to be there, to take ownership of it and pitch ideas to me and know that this is their flick.

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.

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.

You always want to try and evolve an art form. It's not a very humble ambition; it reeks of arrogance. If you can, you want to try to do something that people haven't done before and give people something that they haven't seen.