Computers are scary. Theyre nightmares to fix, lose our stuff, and, on occasion, they crash, producing the blue screen of death. Steve Jobs knew this. He knew that computers were bulky and hernia-inducing and Darth Vader black. He understood the value of declarative design.

There comes a point in your moviegoing life where you look at the screen and then you look at the world and you ask, 'What is going on?' You want the movies to show you the chaos and mess and risk and failure that are normal for a lot of us. Generally, the movies hide all of that.

'Brokeback Mountain' is a sad love story about two people who can't be together, and the reason that they can't be together is because being gay is a stigmatized thing. It would be interesting to have the same movie in which the two guys weren't in the closet and there was no shame about them being gay and they couldn't be together for other reasons. I still feel like we're a long way from that happening.

In movies, there are some things the French do that Americans are increasingly incapable of doing. One is honoring the complexities of youth. It's a quiet, difficult undertaking, requiring subtlety in a filmmaker and perception and patience from us.

I like Nora Ephron. She wasn't a critic in the strictest sense of the word, but she did a lot of social criticism. She was so funny and so in the right place at the right time.

I don't see a lot of studio executives caring at all about what the culture is telling us. They think they make the culture. They're not out taking the temperature of things and using the results of whatever sort of cultural surveying they're doing to make movies. They're interested in doing things that people are already comfortable with, and taking those properties and filling them.

Straight white males: that's the predominant moviegoing category, and the persistence of that is a dismaying maintenance of the status quo.