Much of directing [a movie] is not directing but just listening and being present in the moment and just keeping your eyes open.

Belgrade has kind of a Dublinesque, dear-dirty charm.

My favorite sci-fi always uses its hook to amplify some bigger theme or idea - some emotional thrust.

If you make something interesting, inevitably not everybody is going to like it.

You go from these high hopes when you're writing to just a desperate want of not making a complete fool of yourself by the end of it.

All my favorite movies are somebody else's least favorite movie.

You come out of each movie just thinking, "God, if we can fool them into letting us make just one more, we can get it right."

Writing sucks. I think it's terrible. Writing is not fun, and don't trust anyone who claims to enjoy it. Liars!

Writing in a lot of ways feels more like excavation than construction. It feels like you're uncovering this thing bit by bit, discovering what it is, instead of constructing it upwards.

Showing your movie to an audience... it's like your kid doing a piano recital. 'Just let it not fail. Please.

If I spend a year and a half writing a script, the first year will be outlining in notebooks. It's just the way I work, definitely not necessarily the best way.

Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior ofcapital, and deserves muchthe higher consideration.

The fundamental glue that holds any relationship together is trust.

It's not the time in your life, it's the life in your time.

I don't go for very handsome men. Like they say in England, toy boys break too easily.

This is a strange, little, complacent country [Switzerland], in many ways a USA in miniature but of course nearer the center of disturbance!

A man goes to the doctor for a check, and the doctor exams him and says I've got bad news, you've got cancer and alzheimers. The man goes Thank god I don't have cancer.

Thought is the blossom; language the bud; action the fruit behind it.

Painting is always strongest when in spite of composition, color, etc., it appears as a fact, or an inevitability, as opposed to a souvenir or arrangement.

You stick your nose in the dirt until you find something that smells good.

With my horror movies or with this movie [Valley of Violence], same thing. The subtext of this movie is what to take away from it. Plot is never something that's been my driving force as a filmmaker.