The momentum of production keeps you from giving up, so it's really the editing and writing phases where things can look bleakest.

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.

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

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.

We're deciding the fate of the multiverse with a flip of a coin. Heads or tails, doc. If that isn't a game, I don't know what is.

I am more afraid of my own heart than of the Pope and all his cardinals. I have within me the great Pope Self.

The trick is growing up without growing old.

It's amazing how much you can learn if your intentions are truly earnest.

Labor humanizes, exalts.

There are some few instances in which it is virtuous to disobey.

Write regularly, day in and day out, at whatever times of day you find that you write best. Don't wait till you feel that you are in the mood. Write, whether you are feeling inclined to write or not.

Whenever there was a choice between music and anything else, music won hands down every time.

The camera can represent flesh so superbly that, if I dared, I would never photograph a figure without asking that figure to take its clothes off.

As children everyone thinks their family is weird and they're upset by the weirdness of their own family.