I am a control freak but it's important to feel strongly about the material you're working on.

I feel like math and writing are the same thing. You're putting together a lot of complex things to satisfy different requirements. It's got to be aesthetically pleasing; it's got to have subtext; it's got to convey information.

If something can be explored or illuminated that would have been difficult to verbalize, that to me is what a film should be. It's like trying to explain what a piece of music is like. You can't do it.

The thing that is most important is to feel like you're at the front of the line, to be prime or primer. I definitely never wanted to say that in the films, but that's where it comes from.

Editing is very satisfying process. You spend hours working on something and then you get to watch it. It's immediately satisfying where everything else is just kind of waiting and waiting and waiting.

Cinematography was incredibly foreign to me, so I read as much as I could about it. Once I figured out that it was just photography with a set shutter speed, I got some slide film and I just went about storyboarding the script and taking snapshots. I took a ton of time doing it just to make sure I knew exactly what I was doing. By the end of it I knew what the film was going to look like - my exposure and the composition and everything. I wasn't scared of cinematography anymore.

I never got into 'MacGyver,' but 'All the President's Men' and 'The Conversation' were big for me.