In the writing phase, normally I try not to envisage any particular actors because I like to let the characters sort of reveal themselves in that process.

[If] you want to learn something about somebody, get into a fistfight. You'll learn more in five minutes than you will in five weeks of conversations. It's basic.

I'm not a film-school guy. I was a high-school dropout. I was on a nuclear submarine. I was an electrician. I was a house painter. So if you get in my face, I'm going to fight you.

Well, as far as film, either you're making a film or you're making videos. Digital capture is always trying to emulate the range and look of film. I believe personally that film has more.

I like to do stuff real and practical and in camera, as much as possible. I like old school filmmaking.

To operate а tank as a crew, it's not about five individuals. It has to be one organism, composed of five people.

I feel like, as a filmmaker, I'm at my strongest when I write the script and when it comes from me, out of whole cloth. My best work has always been self-generated.

You never know what you have until you put it in front of an audience. That's the truth. That's the truth of filmmaking and that's why you make movies, for an audience to, hopefully, enjoy it.

I think a good director can embrace any genre and it's the kind of thing where you always want to do something different. You always want to challenge yourself.

I'm one of those big believers that the movie comes together in the way it's supposed to be and that movies are fated to become what they become.

My mantra is "Better is better".

History gives you insight of the same quality of truth as poetry or philosophy or a novel.

I'd love to help the entire world. Even to change the life of one child is amazing.

The birth of Jesus made possible not just a new way of understanding life but a new way of living it.

The sexual act is in time what the tiger is in space.

Sorrow, gladness, yearning, hope, and love belong to all of us, in all times and in all places. Music is the only means whereby we feel these emotions in their universality.

Wink and shut their apprehensions up.

The sky above us is something we have very little control of, and the space beyond is something we don't completely understand.

People always say, "When did you know you were funny?" They don't mean that in a bad way - this already makes me sound like such a jerk.

As soon as we react, we become slaves. A man blames me, and I immediately react in the form of anger. A little vibration which he created made me a slave.

One of the great things about young people is that they do question, that they do care deeply about justice, and they they have open minds.