Just because you've made a couple movies, you've done some good movies, you've been nominated for some Academy Awards, whatever, nobody's entitled. It's a business. If they don't see it, I can think they're wrong, but I'm not entitled to a $15 million budget to make a film.
I tend to relate to a character in terms of the arc: what's interesting is where he starts versus where he ends up.
People wrestle sometimes making movies, and I think that conflict is a very essential thing. I think a lot of very happy productions have produced a lot of very banal movies.
When I'm the one who sits down and looks at the blank page and writes it out all the way, then I'll call it my script.
Look, you've got a generation of people coming along who are going to form their own new relationship with the idea of supporting the causes that they care about or changing the world. And these people are not going to do it the way our parents do it.
Fame is very corrosive and you have to guard very strictly against it.
You never make all things for all people and can't always pander to the broadest denominator. I keep an eye toward doing the themes that interest me. Do they move me? Interest me? Make me think? When I run across something that is provocative in an unsettling way, it appeals to me.
The more you can create that magic bubble, that suspension of disbelief, for a while, the better.
Every little thing that people know about you as a person impedes your ability to achieve that kind of terrific suspension of disbelief that happens when an audience goes with an actor and character he's playing.
Duality is not a story. Duality is just a complexity.
Basically, I think 21st century conservation is moving toward preserving ecosystems by dealing with the needs of people.
I get heartbroken flying into L.A. It's just this feeling of unspecific loss. Can you imagine what the San Fernando Valley was when it was all wheat fields? Can you imagine what John Steinbeck saw?
The film industry needs to confront the physical footprint of the way films get made.
I'm fascinated by the ways in which people express themselves, because their responses are often counter to what they're actually feeling. Like when they're frightened, they tend to freeze. When they're angry, it doesn't always come out as volume. There are wonderful contradictions in the way that people express their emotions.
Anybody who is running a marathon or doing a walkathon, doing a fundraiser for their school, their company, by far it's guaranteed the easiest and most fun way to quickly set up a fundraising campaign and send it around to your friends and family.
I don't smoke and I don't want to smoke. I am not a fan of gratuitous smoking in films.
You know, independent films have been institutionalized, practically. Every studio has got a boutique arthouse label.
It's better for people to miss you than to have seen too much of you.
All people are paradoxical. No one is easily reducible, so I like characters who have contradictory impulses or shades of ambiguity. It's fun, and it's fun because it's hard.
In drama, I think, the audience is a willing participant. It's suspending a certain kind of disbelief to try to get something out of a story.
