There's a film you write, there's a film you shoot, and there's a film that you cut - and they're all different.

Remembering is painful, it's difficult, but it can be inspiring and it can give wisdom.

You're trying to create a screenplay and your screenplay is there to give you a structure, rigidity, situational awareness, who the characters are, what do they want, what's the shape of the thing.

You face challenges and you have to make choices. You're weighing the necessary responsibility toward reality and authenticity and of course the need to create a compressed drama over two hours.

Why are people saying it's too soon? Like the people on that flight, we need to agree about what to do about terrorism. And I think we need to have that conversation now.

In the end, it's acting, it's not real. But every director will tell you that you have to create conditions that create tension, because tension is what makes drama feel real.

You sort of can't talk about the post production unless you talk about what comes first.

The people who went on that airplane were unexceptional.

All directors make films in individual ways. But the classical kind of view of filmmaking is that you have a script and it's very linear.

I think when you think of my films, I think hopefully you think of an extreme sort of real unfolding, real-time, performed, feeling semi-improvised, you know what I mean, all that.

Most of the films that I've written, made in my life, I've written. Not all, but most I would say.

Fulfillment comes not in pursuit of happiness, but rather in pursuit of service.

Somethings can be so simple but bring happiness

So many people are on the front lines of this fossil fuel frenzy. It is infused with a sense of urgency.

Politics really is a team sport. You really have to work the whole system to get somewhere down the road.

The first time when you can really get a sense of what the movie is going to look and feel like is when you're in a casting room and seeing it.

Terror consists mostly of useless cruelties perpetrated by frightened people in order to reassure themselves.

Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams.

The monster is never just there where we think he is. What is truly monstrous is our cowardice and sloth.

there's no forsaking what you love no existential leap as witnessed here in time and blood a thousand kisses deep

The only two men I have time for are Barack Obama and my trainer.