By and large, the making of motion pictures is all about, 'Let's ratchet it up.' And I always think, 'We don't need to ratchet this up.' If you do, don't call it 'Captain Phillips' or 'The Maersk Alabama.' Call it something else, and then you have carte blanche to do anything, down to sea serpents and aliens.

We are still in the position of waking up and having a choice. Do I make the world better today somehow, or do I not bother?

You have to adhere to a philosophy that the life unexamined is not worth living, because otherwise you're just living from day to day and you don't have any real sense of yourself or where you are.

This is what we storytellers do. We restore order with imagination.

The truth is that everyone pays attention to who's number one at the box office. And none of it matters, because the only thing that really exists is the connection the audience has with a movie.

If it wasn't hard, everyone would do it. It's the hard that makes it great.

Every job requires a certain riding of a horse.