I guess what I get excited about when I'm thinking about projects is that toothy, complex area of goodness and badness and the gray areas of human behavior and existence.

Bobby Fischer was hugely important for the American chess community because it put chess on the map - he made it possible for other chess players to make a living.

Every film I make I feel like I am getting a mini-masters degree, it's a wonderful life path and you get to immerse yourself in an intriguing world for a couple of years.

When your entire life is focused around one goal and one goal only, and you have no other pursuits, it enables you to achieve enormous mastery.

Each project draws you in on its own merits as opposed to an intellectual choice of, "Well, I'm going to shift from vérité filmmaking to more archival."

I don't think you make documentary films to get your country house. If you're trying to gamble on that, you've very foolish.

I think the combination of genius and celebrity, in the case of Bobby Fischer, was a dangerous cocktail.

In the Soviet Union, for instance, the pressure on the chess stars was immense. When Boris Spassky came home after losing that match, he found he no longer had an apartment in Moscow.

If you look at the gifted sportsman, like Tiger Woods, or Ryan Giggs, you can see how they have been built up to be so much more than one person could ever be.

All this was new to me. Life takes us by surprise and orders us to move towards the unknown - even when we don't want to and we think we don't need to.

One advantage to having a kid on the spectrum: they tend to be rule followers. Socially, things are harder for them than most kids.

Keeping an open mind is always important.

Stop saying no offense,” I said, “when you say offensive things. It’s not a free pass.

I played a lot of sports and it's the plays in basketball that weren't worked out that are the ones that are just fantastic that you remember. We don't know the power that's within our own bodies.

Don't start smoking. It's much harder to stop than it is not to start at all.

Not everybody's the perfect person in the world. I mean everyone kills people, murders people, steals from you, steals from me, whatever. I think that people need a second chance.

Where are you sleeping tonight? Face down in the mud? That's a British tradition: Take acid and fall asleep in some field.

Each one of us has to take responsibility for reality, and present it so that kids will grow up familiar with that and say, OK. I've seen that before. I'm not afraid of it.