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

The big nut to crack is to how to tell a story, what’s the right way to tell a particular story.

I've never been a guy who had more than a toe in Hollywood anyway, so my toe is more easily lopped off than most.

When you're in love, you're asking someone else to fulfill all your unfulfilled needs, to make you whole, and to make you feel good about everything, and no one can do that.

All I've learned is that you need the studio system sometimes, if your budget is a certain size, and other films you can do independently. When I think of a studio, I generally think of distribution. Since I'm a director, I have a similar creative experience on every film I do, because I can control that. But then it's a different film, I think, as it reaches the public, depending on the way it's marketed. I don't know. I haven't learned much of anything. Sometimes you need them, sometimes you don't. Sometimes they want you, most of the time they don't.

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.

If you establish rules and play by them, the audience will buy in.