In editing, it's amazing how you choose the in and out points. What you cut on is everything for creating tension. It's amazing how expanding a shot by five seconds can just ruin the tension.

You know, when you're isolated on set for like a month, people like to get rowdy.

The way brainwashing works is subtle and takes a long time.

The trappings of a religious cult tend to fall into candlelit ceremonies and robes and group chanting and singing and prayer.

What I learned from directing, I learned from soccer, where it's like a coach-player relationship.

When people leave cults, they don't know that they left a cult.

When I hire actors I believe in their abilities.

When I was a kid, I was afraid of large group of conforming people.

When you write, no matter what, it ends up personal.

You can't write something to please someone.

A big fear of working with an actor that's never been a lead in a film before is that you're going to have to work really hard to pull a performance out of her.

Whole life is a search for beauty. But, when the beauty is found inside, the search ends and a beautiful journey begins.

To speak a language is to take on a world, a culture.

The tiniest mite has an inner life of which we can know nothing.

If you really want to know me, I said, we'll have to start with the witches.

The world said to conform, the world said to settle for less, the world said to compromise and no one would know... so I made my own world.

You take care of the people you love, but it’s true, too, that you take care of the things you own.

literacy is at the heart of sustainable development

Riches, in the hands of a man that is wise and generous, are good for something, but in the hands of a sordid, sneaking, covetous miser, they are good for nothing.

Cut defense spending as part of cutting all federal spending.

Emotional release by itself, no matter how "real," "honest," etc. the emotion may be, is never enough to create a character...such release has no artistic form.