Movies are usually difficult, often insane, constantly challenging and always strangely amusing to make.

Then if your movie clicks with real audiences, you'll be sucked into some sort of Hollywood orbit. It's a devil of a place where the only religion that really counts is box office.

My background was art school, documentary director and surfer with a keen interest in thrilling acts of life threatening stupidity.

Australians don't have a preconceived notion of what things have to be... we can go on a fantastic journey.

In a kind of a way there's a bit of that happening now so we have to be careful to preserve our culture.

Movies are a complicated collision of literature, theatre, music and all the visual arts.

The American formula things are out there but they don't have any stories to tell - we have all the stories to tell - but they're all formula.

Hollywood is horrible... it's beyond satire.

Find your own specific voice in filmmaking and go for it. Either people will get it or they won't and that's what it's all about.

We cheer everyone who goes off to Hollywood and tells American stories but telling Australian stories is the greatest thing you can do.

All the jokes in my films, the comedy, they're not me, I just try to hold a big mirror up to us.

There is something fundamentally wrong in treating the Earth as if it were a business in liquidation.

I think that peace is, in many ways, a precondition of joy.

Courageous leadership is not fearless leadership. What makes you a leader is how you deal with your fears.

The prayer of faith is the only kind that is real prayer, and it is trust in God with full acknowledgment of God's power and love.

Who cares who comes out of the closet or not, so long as you're happy?

I am obsessed with ice cubes. Obsessed.

Some truths did not bear saying, and some lies were necessary.

I don't have any money to hire actors. I just need to get people who are going to do a good job being themselves.

Culture makes pain tolerable by interpreting it's necessity; only pain perceived as curable is intolerable.

Even from the darkest night songs of beauty can be born.