It all starts with the script: it's not worth taking myself away from my family if I don't have something I'm really passionate about.

I don't really distinguish between a fictional hero and a real life hero as a basis for any comparison. To me, a hero is a hero. I like making pictures about people who have a personal mission in life or at least in the life of a story who start out with certain low expectations and then over achieve our highest expectations for them. That's the kind of character arc I love dabbling in as a director, as a filmmaker.

Everybody loves a winner, but nobody loves a winner.

The animal has no intellectual capacity to justify or to find reasons to exist. An animal just exists because it's the natural thing to do.

Humans are the only hunters who kill when not hungry.

You can't start a movie by having the attitude that the script is finished, because if you think the script is finished, your movie is finished before the first day of shooting.

The machinery of the democratic process is really no different today from what it was 150 years ago.