[Making movies] you're not trying to capture reality, you're trying to capture a photograph of reality.

I used and abused drugs and alcohol. When I stopped doing that it became a lot clearer that life goes from inside to giving as opposed to taking and destroying.

If you can talk brilliantly about a problem, it can create the consoling illusion that it has been mastered.

Any time you take a chance you better be sure the rewards are worth the risk because they can put you away just as fast for a ten dollar heist as they can for a million dollar job.

Know what it is the emotional statement to convey, and use taste and judgement to help the actors give their best possible performance.

Either you care, or you don't. There's no in-between. And if you care, then go all of the way.

I haven't come across any recent new ideas in film that strike me as being particularly important and that have to do with form. I think that a preoccupation with originality of form is more or less a fruitless thing. A truly original person with a truly original mind will not be able to function in the old form and will simply do something different. Others had much better think of the form as being some sort of classical tradition and try to work within it.