Basically, when I'm writing something, I think about what is the subject of the piece. The subject of the piece is our fear of getting old, which is a variation on our fear of dying.

There are scenes that were right on the edge, but I always try to err on non-indulgence. It's something that I'm very careful about, that I'm just leaning too hard into something.

When you find your voice, your life takes on grace.

As a child, I probably knew phrases that other children didn't known, like "pitocin drip" or "myocardial infarction." Some kind of knowledge was always in the air. My parents would always talk about science at the dinner table, saying something about this patient or some other patient. So I guess for a nanosecond in early high school, I thought about going into medicine.

People who come to see my movies, you're coming to see a drama masquerading as a genre piece.

My biggest fear in life is to be average.

For instance, The Sixth Sense had mediocre to bad reviews. Slowly, the audience pushed it and it received critical attention.