The movies are not my first priority - the theater is.

I'm lucky if I find one movie a year that's worth doing, and when I do find one, it usually only takes 20-30 days to shoot.

The characters created cannot just be a mouthpiece for the writer. When you look at a piece of writing, and it's genuine and it doesn't feel like every character is just a mouthpiece for the writer, but that they've been created in such a way that they're expressing an idea that a writer wants to get across, that's when a story succeeds.

Audiences grew to like this duality of feeling, where youre both championing a character and youre revolted by them.

If you haven't turned rebel by twenty you've got no heart; if you haven't turned establishment by thirty you've got no brains!

I liked it because it was such a dangerous script and showed just what human beings are capable of. Here was a movie in which Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt, who always win in every movie they ever do, simply don't win. I felt that was outrageous for a commercial movie.

Over the years, I've been trying to build a relationship with an audience. I've tried to maintain as much of a low profile as I could so that those characters would emerge and their relationship with audiences would be protected.