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.

When I was a kid, there was no collaboration; it's you with a camera bossing your friends around. But as an adult, filmmaking is all about appreciating the talents of the people you surround yourself with and knowing you could never have made any of these films by yourself.

I just think that the qualities of leadership are unknown even to the leader until he's tested and given a challenge.

The Internet has been this miraculous conduit to the undeniable truth to the Holocaust.

There's no better way to test a person than to put them in the middle of a war. That's clearly going to show what kind of a character you're telling a story about.

Unprotected sex just feels better in a Waffle House bathroom.

When I was very young, I remember my mother telling me about a friend of hers in Germany, a pianist who played a symphony that wasn't permitted, and the Germans came up on stage and broke every finger on her hands. I grew up with stories of Nazis breaking the fingers of Jews.