I like to make movies the way people made movies in the '70s, where they lived and died with these stories, and cared about them, and went to war for them, and they all said something they wanted to say.

Some stories feel like they need more time or less time to tell. To not obsessively have to trim or add that final two or three minutes is very helpful, because you can just organically follow how the story feels.

If the movie's not communicating, it's not working.

I always see other people as predecessors and admire them.

The only thing worse than a crappy TV show which Paddy Chayevsky couldn't have conceived in his worst nightmare is two megacorps fighting over who thought of the crappy show first.

I don't think there's really observational magic.

All my cuts are always about three hours, at the start, mainly because any scene in the movie that's 90 seconds, I probably shot a five-minute version of. If you just extrapolate that through the whole movie, I have a very long version of every scene, usually because, if there's one funny joke, I'll shoot five because I don't know if the one I like is going to work. I'll get back-ups because my biggest fear is to be in previews, testing the movie, and a joke doesn't work, but I have no way to fix it because I have no other line.