You don't do pictures because the audience is ready for them. You do them because there's something gnawing at you, something inside.

What I love about writing is the contradictions we all embody as human beings.

Walk through Santa Monica and try to find somebody who knows a young man or woman who's in this war. Here, war is an intellectual concept. If you lose your son or daughter, it's no longer an intellectual matter.

Right after we invaded Iraq, I put a sign on my lawn that said "War is not the answer." That sign was either defaced, ripped up, or stolen every week. I had to replace that sign twelve times.

A creative person has to believe in the unseen and the untouched.

What happens when these young men and women come home so scarred and so wounded? We are ignoring that fact. We're just shoving them under the carpet.

You don't make a film because the audience is ready for it. You make a film because you have questions that are in your gut.