All of my movies are about how I wish the world would work. I've made very few movies about how the world worked. I could name them on one and a half hands, about how my movies have been very reflective of how the world was exactly. A lot of my movies are really about the way I wish the world was, and that's what this whole art form is all about. It's an interpretive art form.

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

I don't go through a torturous intellectual process to decide what to direct. I know what I want to direct the second I read something or hear a story. I just know when it grabs me in a certain way I want to direct it. And then I spend the next four to six months trying to talk myself out of it, because directing is really hard! But it's true, I know essentially when and what I want to do next... it's an undeniable feeling I get and it's not the same feeling I get when I wind up producing something.

I'm very used to working with first time actors - you can just look back at 'E.T.' with Drew Barrymore, and Christian Bale from 'Empire of the Sun,' who'd never made a movie before.

I'm not really interested in making money.

I'm always in favor of Israel responding strongly when it's threatened. At the same time, a response to a response doesn't really solve anything. It just creates a perpetual-motion machine.

I basically went into business for myself. But it never amounted to anything. I learned a lot about editing and dubbing by watching all the professionals do it, but I never got a job out of my imposition.