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

When something is beautiful in math, everything is just perfectly lined up, and you see through sheer thought that something really beautiful can take place.

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.

I have a really, really hard time sitting down and watching a TV show, except I'm apparently willing to watch the same episode of 'It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia,' like, seven times.

I feel like we want to compartmentalise things and say, 'Well, that's emotional, artistic and subjective, while this is intellectual, objective and measured.' I have difficulty thinking that's the way we experience things.

My favorite films are the ones that I walk away from and I know I saw a story.

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.