The idea of devoting two years of my life to making a corporate product that looks and smells and tastes like a lot of other things out there with just a different trademark character is a bore.

There's a level of immersion that is perfect and there's a level that, for my taste, starts to actually exceed what the screen can provide. At that point, you're kind of overexceeding yourself.

The boundary between real life and acting is hard to find.

The funny thing about me is I move from genre to genre, but I essentially shoot all the movies the same way.

Movies aren't just supposed to be a representation of reality. They're supposed to be an art.

One of my favourite movies is Billy Wilder's 'The Apartment.' It's shot in super wide screen, and it's beautiful.

I'm really very lucky. I get to do an awful lot. I've been able to make an incredibly wide range of movies and work with an incredible array of people.

We should be writing more great roles for women, period. Another problem is that movies are generally made for 14-year-old boys, and 14-year-old boys want to watch 25-year-old action heroes.

If you respect the events and respect the real life tragedy, you can drive your film to address it in some mature way.

Just because your leg might heal doesn't mean it doesn't feel broken. It doesn't mean that a car hitting your body doesn't hurt like the same it would hurt if a car hit your body.

Filmmakers get into trouble when they're watching too many DVDs and quoting all the time.

Life is not a popularity contest.

Alice would choose to love herself, different and extraordinary, every day of the week.

If you will not hear reason, she'll rap your knuckles.

Competition is warfare. Mostly it is played by prescribed rules--there is a sort of Geneva Convention for competition--but it's thorough and often brutal.

Peace produced by suppression is neither natural nor desirable.

One forms provisional theories and waits for time or fuller knowledge to explode them. A bad habit, Mr. Ferguson, but human nature is weak. Sherlock Holmes speaking with Dr. Watson.

You kill men for the wrongs they have done, not the wrongs that they may do someday.

Clearly, the Global Economy isn't working for workers in China and Indonesia and Burma any more than it is for workers here in the United States.

I am always a big believer that if you work hard enough and you work out of passion, a person can do anything.

I have a cause higher and nobler than my own, a cause to which all private interests and concerns must be subordinated.