There's a fantastic, thousand-page book by David Thomson about [David O. Selznick]. Again, it's not the best argument or the best advertisement for his story, because most people aren't going to read a thousand-page book. But I feel like the rise and fall and the work [Mayer] produced - not just the movies, but the memos, the volume of writing - he's just so passionate, and that's really exciting.

Now I'm in a situation where I have to plan very far ahead because there are people who are selling ads, so I have to really know what I'm going to do months in advance. If something's taking me a little bit longer to research, that's not okay. I can't take longer. I have to just get it done.

I don't know if it's entirely fair to blame [Dennis Wilson] early death and complete self-destruction on his involvement with Charles Manson, but it was certainly a factor. It affected him psychologically and emotionally.

The only Sundance [2011] film about cults that could actually have life as a cult film, THE WOODS has the greatest comic insight into why our current culture might inspire a search for meaning in the first place.

I have a degree in cinema studies and the big paper I wrote at the end of that was about Judy Garland and Liza Minnelli. So I thought that I knew quite a bit about Judy Garland, but I read in passing that the Stonewall riots were a reaction to her death and I had never really read enough to know what that meant or how that could be true. I was interested in that I knew so much about Judy Garland, but I really didn't know this story.

The thing that breaks my heart about [Dennis Wilson] is that he was very naïve from the beginning to the end.

As a performer, I could be like, "I don't want to leave that in there." But as a producer, I have to leave it in there.