Action to me is something very fun to shoot.

I used to be a die-hard defender of physical film, which I still am. I love shooting on physical film and I think it's great.

Evil is a really tough concept for me. The idea of a villain that is bad for bad's sake seems kind of absurd.

I was writing from the time I was 12 years old, but I originally wanted to be a novelist.

Success is never bad in Hollywood. It is what you do with success that will dog you.

Directing my own writing, I see that I talk way too much, and everything can happen much sooner, with much less said about it.

While I was a voracious movie-goer as a boy, I never put writing and films together in my mind.

My films do very well on home video.

Directing has completely changed the way I write and watch films.

To me, the ultimate crime in an adaptation is the crime of reverence. A novel is one form of media, a screenplay is another, and a movie is yet another. There's even reverence to a screenplay.

I love films like Deliverance where you can watch it over and over again and decode all of its many different meanings.

The place where you made your stand never mattered. Only that you were there...and still on your feet.

Nobody likes, you know, the ugly parts of politics.

You can't be an American without being related to other Americans.

I've seen foreigners really shift on their view of America, and that's hard for me to take.

Cool to me is following what you believe in.

Because God loves us, he lets us know exactly how to have access to him.

If you want to make friends, go out of your way to do things for other people--things that require time, energy, unselfishness, and thoughtfulness.

The whole path of American music has been so much about the recognition of stylistic diversity, and the recognition of the importance of music which was from one of the vernacular traditions.

The value of failure is greatly over-rated. It's a preposterous myth.

I can't remember the last time I went to a game and there was a fight. I think they fight more in baseball now than they do in hockey.