Right before 'The Bourne Identity' came out, I hadn't been offered a movie in a year.

I'm always cautious about overstepping any boundaries. At the end of the day, it's a director's medium, and if they don't want to hear from me I just step back.

It's intuitive in terms of when I read a piece of material or I hear about a project. I'm a writer, so I've written movies. I've read at this point thousands and thousands and thousands of screenplays. So if something gets me, then I don't ignore that.

It's usually the exact same three things which are, the Scripts, the Director and the Role those are the three things I look for and really any two of them, If I get two of them that's usually enough, but definitely those are the things I look for.

And you know, we were talking about American identity, and where we've come from and where we are and where we're headed. We knew that we wanted to have a hopeful ending and we wanted it to be pro-community, and a pro-democracy type of movie.

I need to know if she [Sarah Palin] thinks dinosaurs were here four thousand years ago... because she's going to have the nuclear code.

For Ripley I learned to play some songs on the piano, and I never really played them again.