I want to give the audience what they want, but not at all costs. I want to leave them with something. I try to do that with every single movie I make.

It's always about a character that I become obsessed with and who refuses to leave me alone.

I want people to feel something in the pit of their stomach. I want my movies, especially the ending, to stay with people long after the credits have rolled.

The secret is you need a director who refuses to walk away and you need a director willing to put their whole career behind the project.

As a director I always look at someone's eyes. How truthful are they? Will this person take me on this journey?

I want to give up every single day of my life, but I can't. I'm obsessed.

The instinct of self-preservation is above all the laws

Satan was a blunderer ... who made a stupendous failure. If he had succeeded, we should all have been worshipping him, and his portrait would have been more flattering.

It's always great to play a man who sets himself up to be punctured.

This is what it always comes down to, I realized. There are the ones who believe, and the ones who don't, and caught in the space between them are guns.

What an encouragement to realize that God has reserved you and me for a special task in His great work. In His hands we're not only useful, but priceless.

People do seem to think that I'm going to be some wicked witch, and then they're always surprised to find out I'm just a little clumsy nerd.

Culture looks beyond machinery, culture hates hatred; culture has one great passion, the passion for sweetness and light.

Death is an endless retirement with a pension of nothingness.

I was fortunate in the last century to be in the two biggest hits film-wise, "Godfather I" and "Godfather II," and "Lonesome Dove".

Heaven for me is hidden in a little Host Where Jesus, my Spouse, is veiled for love. I go to that Divine Furnace to draw out life, And there my Sweet Saviour listens to me night and day.