If I'm a director and I read a script and I say yeah I really want to do this, I would never walk away because the deal wasn't very good - that I wasn't getting paid very much or that the chances that I would see anything on the back end were remote because of the financial waterfall and the way it's structured. I would never use that as a reason not to do something.

I come from a generation that was surrounded by popular music, but I don't know if anybody's ever going to move the ball forward as far and as fast as the Beatles did.

I'm obviously really opinionated, but as a producer, you don't necessarily want the person you're working with to try to impress you - you want them to just be themselves.

Every time you make something that somebody likes, your impulse is to remind them that if you hadn't made some of these other things that they hated, you wouldn't have been able to make the thing that they liked.

My experience over the years with working with people who are not actors or not trained actors is that you have to get to know them well enough to see what they have that's translatable onto the screen. So you're constantly calibrating to play to their strengths. And the key is to never ask them to do things that are beyond their abilities or are really far away from who they are at their core.

Warner Bros. has talked about going out with low-cost DVDs simultaneously in China because piracy is so huge there. It will be a while before bigger movies go out in all formats; in five years, everything will.

When we look at what's going on in the world and we see the immense level of conflict that seems to always be happening - you can always trace it back to competing narratives.