I wanted to do another movie that could make us laugh and cry and feel good about the world. I wanted to do something else that could make us smile. This is a time when we need to smile more and Hollywood movies are supposed to do that for people in difficult times.

I missed my dad a lot growing up, even though we were together as a family. My dad was really a workaholic. And he was always working.

We all feel that if we have a crazy idea that might get laughed at, there's nothing wrong with seeing if there's a crazy writer out there who agrees with us and can take it to a crazy network and somehow bring something that's a little bit daft and edgy to life.

Only a generation of readers will span a generation of writers.

My movies more often are told through pictures, not words. But in this case, the pictures took second position to the incredible words of Abraham Lincoln and his presence [...] I was less interested in an outpouring of imagery than in letting the most human moment of this story evolve before us.

One of the gratuities about being a director is that you can volunteer yourself out of difficult details.

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.