Refreshing honesty has been getting me in trouble since I was five, but it's probably had some positive effects - like not being a liar.

I think probably everybody works most on the beginning and the ending.

I don't like scripts leaking. On the other hand, the more real attention a script gets, the better.

Yeah, well I can't see a situation where I wouldn't at least re-write as a director something I was going to direct. At the moment, I wouldn't direct anything that I hadn't written. I can now say, as everybody else says, that it all depends on the script.

I don't think you need $35 million bucks to make a movie. I think what people should do is make a lot more movies for a lot less money. You can really do it.

I have no reason as a director to have films go up in versions that I don't like. My only experience of film after ten years is honestly that if a picture doesn't get second-guessed you're looking at four Oscars, and if a picture does get second-guessed, you're not. I've got an advanced degree in that lesson.

On historical you take the known facts, dramatize them, and then stitch them together by invention. It's a projective thing.