I think that music is a very difficult art form in which to be avant-garde. When we sit down to listen to a piece of music, I think our implicit hope is that we're going to find it beautiful, or at least emotional, on some level.

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.

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.

Surprisingly, I don't throw away that much. I don't move forward with a lot of things unless they're going somewhere. You also have to remember that when you're working with other artists, you have to be really careful about how you deal with that stuff.

The traditional models for success are just also disappearing.

It takes one asshole to ruin the whole thing. That's it. One. The problem with the world is one asshole comes up with a really bad idea and now we're all taking our shoes off at the airport.