I want to form a political party that's based entirely on what music people listen to. To me, it's a much better barometer of what they think and feel than their political stance.

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.

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.

What are the stories you want people to tell about you?

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.

To me the director’s job is to leave it in better shape than you found it, literally.

I think often people fall into the breadth trap of wanting to do too long a period of time, and obviously there's this sort of algorithm of how much depth you can put into something times how much of their life you're trying to show. My attitude has always been, I'd rather show a briefer period of time in more detail than a longer period of time in less detail.