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.

Cell phones tend to bring us more inside of our lives whereas movies offer a chance to escape, so there are two competing forces.

Naturally, it is a terrible, despicable crime when, as in Munich, people are taken hostage, people are killed. But probing the motives of those responsible and showing that they are also individuals with families and have their own story does not excuse what they did.

The thing that I'm just scared to death of is that someday I'm going to wake up and bore somebody with a film.

I think all directors should be animators.

I see some parallels between then [Lincoln's era] and now. Certainly the division of ideologies between two parties, the Democratic Party and the Republican Party. In 1865, the Democrats were the Conservatives and the Republicans were the progressives, and today it's just the opposite.

Social media has taken over in America to such an extreme that to get my own kids to look back a week in their history is a miracle, let alone 100 years.