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.

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.

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

If everything is an illusion. To experiment is to find out what's real.

There are as many kinds of beauty as there are habitual ways of seeking happiness.

Gossip is called gossip because it's not always the truth.

Basically, a manager is a father figure to 20 or 25 blokes. It's about trying to get the best out of them and creating team spirit.

Either you let your life slip away by not doing the things you want to do, or you get up & do them

In retrospect it always seems to work out that you can look back on something that was a disaster and find some gems in there.

Men have got more of a discerning eye. They appreciate cut and details, things that aren't so obvious. They like things that have cachet and gentlemanliness.

I went to Kerala in India, to learn Ayurveda, which was fantastic.

Everybody is worth everything.

The silences express so much and are so crucial in music, and prose does not allow for the creation of these silences, these white spaces on the page or the computer screen.