As a teenager, I wanted to write novels. By college, it was theater, plays, and then, shortly, it was film.

I did The Newton Boys and during the whole process of making the film, I may have spent a week in Los Angeles.

I'd like to quit thinking of the present as some minor insignificant preamble to something else.

Everything that you could think about in life, or experience, or be interested in, theoretically should be expressed or dealt with in cinema. But the way typical narratives are set up, there's no room for philosophy, because it's just digressive material. It's not advancing the plot, so there's no place for it. It's the kind of stuff you would cut out, and that you shouldn't have put in there to begin with.

I don't think all films should necessarily look like they do on digital video. I think it cheats the audience, at some point. If you try to make an epic and you shoot it digitally, that doesn't make much sense. I think there's a certain kind of film that could be a "digital film." But it shouldn't be interchangeable with other films. It should be something more than just a capture medium. It should be a different form altogether, something new.

It's luck that one thing works out and one doesn't, it's sort of happenstance.

Something about Texas I'm not proud of is that our state murdered 37 people last year alone.