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.

I've tried to get better about weighing what I think the accessibility of an idea is against the cost of executing it. I've tried to be smarter about that, because if you're not smart about that, you're going to be unemployed. But I'm still mystified about what works for people. And I'm not talking about my movies, I'm talking in general. I'm mystified by the stuff that doesn't work. I'm mystified by what's going on in the critical side, too.

If you're not smart enough to know what Fidel meant during the Cuban revolution, that - when they were on the Granma - Fidel was already a rock star in Cuba, and how important that was to the indigenous population, then you're not paying attention.

You can't get good at anything unless you do it day in and day out, over and over.

I was lucky that I was getting exposed to a lot of different kinds of films, and I was liking them all. So it seemed logical to me that you could - as in the style of the studio directors of the 30s and 40s - jump from one genre to the next, with the same satisfaction.

I'm always a little unnerved when I see a show that's set in the past that implies in any way that things were nicer then.

There is sadness of when you're watching someone enjoy something that you think is substandard. The ineffable sadness when someone is happy and something is not as good as it should be.