I go to a lot of independents and foreign films. I really try to keep up and see what there is to see. If you really love movies, it's the act of watching them that you really love. You can sit and watch a B-Western and have just as much fun watching that as you can a classic. That minute when the lights go down is the part where the magic happens, because you know this could be great. You're always kind of excited, like, "Here I am again in the church of movies, and Mass is starting.".

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.

You do form a cadre of people that you trust and who are good at their jobs and who know you and what your quirks and foibles are. It makes making movies very collegial and a lot more fun.

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.

Finding a writer who can write decent kids' dialog and finding kids that can act realistically and not 'cute' is an effort.

Editing is where movies are made or broken. Many a film has been saved and many a film has been ruined in the editing room.

So I've always been kind of an apocalyptic kind of kid, and looking back at the movies I've done, there's some kind of apocalypse in them. So that must be what scares me... besides Republicans.