I like it when actors depart from the script to find their characters.

When an audience is laughing, that's opening their souls somehow, and when you have an audience with an open soul, it's much better to hit them with a knife.

Germans try to categorize films: in a comedy, you just laugh and in a drama, you're not allowed to laugh. I don't believe in that, sometimes we laugh and cry in the same hour.

Whenever I'm making a feature film, I wish I were filming a documentary, because making feature films is so stressful. It happens every time.

Maybe every two films you need to do documentary to tell what you really want to tell and not be limited by the medium. With documentary you don't create the reality you have to hunt the reality.

Fiction is my home, I came from fiction, I like to tell stories.

I don't like violence in movies, I'm not a kind of Tarantino fan. But sometimes it's necessary.

As a director, you can transform your vision more with the music.

I always listen to music when I write, I need a rhythm to write.

Once I start shooting I forget the scriptwriter in me. I like things flowing. If you have talented actors who bring their own ideas, it can be much better than what you have worked out.

A book can not control you when you are the writter.

If you read something, what you have written you ain't gonna like it...- It sounds horrible... so write don't read your own stuff.

The sober guy is always going to have this air of arrogance or self-righteousness, but it's not my intention. I just knew that if I drank, I'd have a drinking problem.

It's easier in an urban world to cast the blame outward. So I've learned a lot about my own process in that way.

How do you caution a fawn about a cigarette a motorist has just flipped from his car window into a patch of yellow grass, or tell a sparrow that winged creatures eventually plummet to earth?

Mom thinks I live in this dream world where everybody's Ivana Trump.

Patriotism is usually the refuge of the scoundrel. He is the man who talks the loudest.

I realized that this story [Shelter] is all about family, family loss, and how it influences you day to day life.

It just feels good to play again. That's what keeps me going. I've focused harder because of it.

Before we can realize who we really are, we must become conscious of the fact that the person we think we are, here and now, is at best an impostor and a stranger.