I don't walk around talking about my life and spouting my philosophy to people I don't know. I mean, if I get to know them, I'll talk for hours. I guess I like a lower-key scene.

Radical Islam and US exceptionalism are in bed with each other. They're like lovers, methinks.

Get your sense of outrage back, and your sense of defiance and spirit back, and try to put these pieces together and confront the excesses of empire at every turn.

Getting trapped back in the '80s, it's almost like a comic nightmare, which for me is a very real nightmare. Every time I flip through the cable, I have flashbacks.

If you help manufacture an enemy that's really evil, you can point to the fact that it's really evil, and say, "Hey, it's really evil."

I wanted to just be a filmmaker, and I thought I wanted to do all the aspects, and it seemed like as a producer was the best way to do it, because I could have... You never have control on a movie, but you have as much control as you can. You can push it through, and you can hire the right people.

Most movies, once the action starts there's no more characters. You say a couple of dumb lines and then there's just explosions until the end.