I think that anybody that wants to direct, particularly writers, should spend some time in an editing room, whether it's a film of theirs or someone else's, or shoot their own picture on video and cut it.

There's a way of thinking that comes with being an editor that is incredibly useful on the set. It's not just a vocabulary thing or a right-to-left thing or script supervisor stuff. It's a way of thinking about the film and the shots and the way they fit together, what you need and what you don't need, and what you can get away with if you have to.

When filmmakers are kept from making films, there's a lot of different reasons why. Sometimes you work on a film and cast it and do all the work and can be just a month away from shooting, and all of a sudden, the whole thing goes up in smoke. But I do think the advent of a digital revolution is going to provide people with opportunities to make films that they never would have had before. I think you can do some pretty credible stuff now with very, very little money. Which I think is great for young filmmakers.

Avatar' is the greatest, most comprehensive collection of movie cliches ever assembled, but it's put together in a brand new way with a new technology, and tremendous imagination, making it a true epic and a kind of a milestone.

What's the shelf life of a 1931 movie? If it still exists, there will always be film buffs and a niche audience who will want to see it. But in terms of people even understanding in common usage, some of the words we use to describe these movies, I don't know how long that's going to last.

A lot of filmmakers from my generation were lucky enough to have their work more or less perpetuated by people who saw them originally on TV and on HBO and certainly on home video.

The dynamic is extremely similar to Gremlins and the hero is very similar, plus the small town atmosphere. It really is in a way the third Gremlins movie.