I think the most important thing really was that you could take very personal ideas and present them to an audience in entertaining ways.

Humor is unavoidable. It might not feel funny in the moment, but more often than not there's a light at the end of the tunnel.

I'm not a caterer. I just have to stay with my creative convictions. At some point, you have to just get past the special-interest groups and do what you're there to do, which is make a movie.

A long time ago, I stopped trying to look at projects as genre exercises.

I think more and more scientists are becoming convinced that it's very likely that life forms of some kind exist all around the universe not so far from us.

If I had to choose between a great acting job and a good directing job, I'd choose the directing job.

Of course, I was completely enthralled by the space program as a kid - particularly Apollo 11 - and was glued to the television like most of the world. Then I stopped thinking about it too much. I was a little disappointed that they weren't going on to Mars at the time, but I didn't think much of it. I was more interested in becoming a director at that point in my life and falling in love, things like that.