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

Well, even to this day, if I smell a Big Mac, I'm like Pavlov's dog. My mouth starts watering immediately, like, 'Man, that is so good,' but I can't take a bite of it.

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.

Ultimately, if you want to make movies, you've got to want to make movies every day, when people are paying you to make movies and when they're not, because you're going to get a lot more no's on this business, no matter what it is, than you are going to get yeses.

I think that I'm pretty much who you see onscreen. Are there times when I ask questions of people and have a sense of what their answer may be? Sure. I think that you can't deny that. But you still want to hear from that person, even though you may anticipate what they may say. I am as natural right now as I am when I talk to somebody in the Middle East. It's just trying to be a real person to them. So long as I can be as honest with myself when I make a movie like that, I can continue to be honest with you.

It's hard to hear that your good intentions are making things worse and tragic.

I think we've unplugged and become very apathetic to a lot of things that are happening. There's so much going on and we're sort of disconnected.