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.

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.

I'm in the process of working out an arrangement to make some very, very, very small films in the midst of all these films and maybe that will help. But you get tired of talking. You just want to do it.

I guess why the Ocean's films are hard for me is because on the one hand you have to make sure the performances are there, but on the other hand it's a film that demands, to my mind, a very layered and complex visual scheme. That takes a lot of time to figure out.

A real explosion is not only much more fun to shoot, it also helps the actors and creates an energy on set and ultimately in the scene.

I think about art a lot only in two contexts. One is narrative... The other thing that I'm interested in, which is tangential, but not unrelated... All art to me is about problem solving.

There's a difference between failures and things that are bad.