We [people] are a species that's wired to tell stories. We need stories. It's how we make sense of things. It's how we learn.

I make every movie like it's the last one. "If this was the last movie, what decision would I make?" That's how I make my decisions.

It's a weird thing to say, but it would appear to me axiomatic that if you understood fully what I was doing and appreciated it, you would like it.

In nature, if a cell gets too big, it divides. You can't come up with a set of rules that's going to work for 350 million people. You're just not.

Nobody's talking about movies the way they're talking about their favorite TV shows.

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.

But my sense in talking to people when I travel is that the film business is not that dissimilar from a lot of other businesses.