I've never made a movie to make money. I've never made a painting to make money.

If I hung one of my paintings next to someone else's, I knew mine would kind of pop off the wall.

In a certain way, my work had set me up to be against lots of things. If there wasn't some sort of sanction for it in the public world, it might have been...it wouldn't have been tolerated, because people don't want things to get shaken up.

When art is really great, it's really powerful, can really do something to you, make you feel more alive and make you feel more connected to something. If you don't feel like that when you do it, and you just make a movie to make money, that would be pretty boring to me. I just wouldn't do it. That would be like sitting in an office, which I don't want to do.

When I'm making a movie, I don't like to know what's going to happen next. I like to watch something and be surprised all the time, and just not know, and let it take me wherever.

Nobody is perfect. I don't think it's the most scathing indictment of anybody. It's pretty innocuous. [Miral] is just the story of one family and one girl, living in that part of the world, and that's what goes on over there. I thought that maybe it would be informative and useful for people to know more about it.

I don't know if I could, like, see a face and know what the face of beauty looks like, but after I've seen it I know if I've felt like it was beauty.