From a very young age, my parents taught me the most important lesson of my whole life: They taught me how to listen. They taught me how to listen to everybody before I made up my own mind. When you listen, you learn. You absorb like a sponge - and your life becomes so much better than when you are just trying to be listened to all the time.

I really trust the authenticity of real people and my job is to get them to be themselves in front of the camera. Often what happens is, you'll get a newcomer in front of the camera and they'll freeze up or they imitate actors or other performances that they've admired and so they stop becoming themselves. And so my job as the director is just to always return them to what I first saw in them, which was simply an uncensored human being.

I would lose myself too much if I thought of myself as the audience.

I'm very collaborative with everybody on the set.

It's still a mystery to me, but even though my mother was like an older sister to me, I kind of put her up on a pedestal.

People often tell me how much they love the digital skies that we obviously painted for 'War Horse.' Well, there's not a single sky that we put in through special effects. The skies you see in the movie are the skies that we experienced - but it was definitely challenging at times.

I've learned there are a lot of people that don't want to believe the Holocaust ever happened because it doesn't fit their other beliefs and so they deny it and it makes them sleep better at night to do so. But it makes the Holocaust survivors sleep better at night to know that we've given them a voice.