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.

We never did just one take. Multiple takes. Many. I did a bunch. Sometimes I do one take. Sometimes I did 20.

Independent films are very hard to get made, but I'm lucky enough to get them made, so I'm going to keep doing it. I like my independence. I like being able to tell a story the way I want to tell a story. I don't like developing it with a team. I like coming to a story and deciding whether I want to do it or not.

The radical rightwing pegs Hollywood as a leftist town, which is completely wrong. There are a lot of actors, writers, and directors who talk a liberal agenda... but all the studio bosses, for as long as there have been studios, have all been as far rightwing as you can possibly imagine.

There's something that's so basically corrupt about any system in which a good and fair profit is not enough. There has to be more, every year, every quarter, because your stock price has to rise.

I really wanted to make a nonpolitical political film. I wanted something that folks in red states and blue states could look at and not ask if this is the right thing to do to be in this war, but what this war is doing to the fabric of our society.

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.