I actually didn't find out about a lot of music until I was older. Some people have been listening to the Beatles their whole lives; I didn't discover them until I was 18 years old.

I think I'm good at amplifying an actor's strengths, and minimizing their weaknesses. And they all have strengths and weaknesses.

When a film like Chris Nolan's Memento cannot get picked up, to me independent film is over. It's dead.

To me the director’s job is to leave it in better shape than you found it, literally.

If you're sitting around thinking what other people think about your work, you'll just become paralysed.

We [people] are a species that's wired to tell stories. We need stories. It's how we make sense of things. It's how we learn.

I want to thank anyone who spends part of their day creating...anybody who spends part of their day sharing their experience with us-I think this world would be unlivable without art and I thank you.

You’re supposed to expand your mind to fit the art, you’re not supposed to chop the art down to fit your mind.

There are three major social issues that this country is struggling with: education, poverty, and drugs. Two of them we talk about, and one of them we don't.

What are the stories you want people to tell about you?

The ought to be a worldwide cultural taskforce that just stops you when you have ideas like combining The Red Desert with an armored car heist movie.

Every day is a new day and every sunrise brings hope to the hopeless”.

What ye have been ye still shall be, When we are dust the dust among, O yellow flowers!

Life may have no meaning. Or even worse, it may have a meaning of which I disapprove.

Producers and studios want to make movies that are more appealing internationally and I think that you have to use your different cultures as an advantage to be able to make those movies.

My opinion is a view I hold until... well, until I find something that changes it.

The following is a phrase we don't hear enough but that I sincerely mean (and our culture needs to hear more often): I love being married.

What a thrill, what a shock, to be alive on a morning in June, prosperous, almost scandalously privileged, with a simple errand to run.

I like to come into my workspace and feel its a living environment and not frozen, which is why I often change or add to the pictures on the wall.

Except that my father got a raise, and my mother didn't because she doesn't get paid for housework, and my sister stopped reading those self-esteem books because she met a new boy

We can't be confined to one way of thinking, and that terrifies our leaders. It means we can't be controlled. And it means that no matter what they do, we will always cause trouble for them.