Any time an opportunity scares you that much, you should seriously consider saying yes.

I’ve never agreed with the conventional wisdom that ‘actors are great liars.’ If more people understood the acting process, the goals of good actors, the conventional wisdom would be ‘actors are terrible liars,’ because only bad actors lie on the job. The good ones hate fakery and avoid manufactured emotion at all costs. Any script is enough of a lie anyway. (What experience does any actor have with flying a spacecraft? Killing someone?) What’s called for, what actors are hired for, is to bring reality to the arbitrary.

I was not familiar with the book [before filming in The Outsiders] , though. Interestingly, The Outsiders had not reached the point where it is now, where it's required reading in sixth and seventh grades. In my sixth and seventh grade, we did not, but today everyone does.

About Last Night... [movie] still stands up for me. Like, I'm as proud of that today and still have the kind of faith in it today to show it to a young couple as I did when it came out.

So I came to the realization: Nothing in life is unfair. It's just life.

Nothing in life is unfair. It's just life. To the extent that I had any inner turmoil, I had only myself to blame. I also thought of my two boys and what kind of example I hoped to be. I would always want them to take charge of their own futures and not be paralyzed by the comfort and certainty of the status quo or be cowed by the judgment of those on the outside looking in.

[The Specials ]was always going to be an underground, underdog kind of movie. But I love when people bring that up, because it's very early, vintage James Gunn.