The ratings system is so bogus and people know it. Fewer and fewer people care. The ratings board has sort of exposed itself. But my problem is, as a parent, there's this area of film that my daughters want to see. They're not my kind of films, I don't want to go see them, but I really want to know whether my daughters can see them or not. The morality of what the ratings board is doing now escapes me. I don't get it.

Ninety percent of the preparation we do as actors is just jive. It doesn't do anything.

I've written a lot of scripts that someone else directed, and it's absolutely vital that, if I'm gonna act in it, then I have to take off the writer hat and let the director direct.

Nothing else counts except what you want.

So much of the violence in the movies is b.s. violence: A guy in the middle of a large city with 14 people lying on the ground that he's just killed with his superhuman powers, and there's not a cop to be found. Not a siren to be heard. No price to be paid. That's not true, and I don't like that sort of stuff.

I do love comedy, but I'm not brave enough to tackle a script whose goal is to make you laugh. That's tough. The ones that can do it, I tip my hat off to them, but I don't have that kind of humor or mind.

I'm a firm believer that character is highly overrated. Character is a trick that we do with the audience's collusion.