My mother did an incredible job - one, of just being a great mom, but two, of instilling a tremendous amount of empathy into me as a young man, as a young person. My mom was kind of this collector of people; throughout my childhood, it didn't matter who you were. She was a high school counselor and then a junior high counselor, and she didn't just counsel students, she counseled other teachers and administrators and coaches.

One of my beliefs as a filmmaker is that if you can make somebody laugh, you can make them listen. With laughter, you can get somebody's guard down, you can open them up to listening to you. They don't feel like they're being preached to or talked down to. I think it helps, it makes really hard to understand information a little more accessible and palatable. And at the end of the day, it makes a movie a little more fun. It doesn't feel so heavy handed.

You come downstairs, turn off the TV, and then and your son says, 'Daddy, I want to get that wrestling set, and all the pieces are sold separately.' The minute he quotes a commercial verbatim, that's when he's had enough TV.

When you train your employees to be risk averse, then you're preparing your whole company to be reward challenged.

I feel like throughout history we've heard bullshit from politicians, but now we're at the perfect intersection of technology and entertainment where we can, in real time, produce something that holds people accountable. That's an exciting time to be living in.

Seventy-five percent of Americans don't even have passports. We don't even think about traveling beyond our borders.

I don't know. I have incredible amounts of hope that things can change. It takes people who believe.