I was always a filmmaker before I was anything else. If I was always anything, I was a storyteller, and it never really made much of a difference to me what medium I worked in.

Leo Tolstoy said the purpose of art is to teach you to love life. And that's what I want.

I'm mainly interested in people trying to figure s#!t out.

As a writer, you have control of the words you put on the page. But once that manuscript leaves your hand, you give control to the reader. As a director, you are limited by everything: weather, budget, and egos.

What’s the difference between and actor and a movie star. An actor is someone who pretends to be somebody else. A movie star is somebody who pretends that somebody else is them.

Having done, you know, science fiction, I didn't want to get trapped in science fiction. So my eclecticism was my only conscious choice. I didn't want to find myself in a niche that I couldn't get out of.

Movie studios, Hollywood studios, by and large are not making the kind of movies that I go to see.