I like some time away to recharge the batteries, not only physically but emotionally, so that I get to the point where I'm just dying to direct again, and then that's the right time to do it again.
If America had a motto, it would be pull yourself up by the bootstraps, work harder than the next guy, have a goal and achieve it.
Every time you do a true story - and I've done a few - you have to look in the mirror and say, 'That's close enough. I'm comfortable with this.' You're always going to compress time; you're going to change the order of things. But I don't think you want to tell a big lie. You want to think that you're embracing the truth.
A good deed is a good deed.
We did not go to that many movies in a theater in the little town I grew up in.
Every director knows it is his job to be manipulative. When you make an edit, you are trying to manipulate.
I didn't know the books and certainly didn't know the tragic origin story of Mary Poppins in 1906 Australia.
Every generation comes upon the movie again, and then, invariably, the books have a spike in sales because people want to read more about Mary Poppins.
Many years ago, I was a producer on a movie called 'My Dog Skip.' Willie Morris, the great southern writer, had written the book. We had adapted it and taken 17 years of his life and compressed it into one year.
I grew up in a refinery town in Texas, and we weren't fancy enough to have a McDonald's.
'Snow White and the Huntsman' was - I came in before they started shooting and basically worked on Charlize Theron's character for the most part. I guess I probably worked four or five weeks on that one and stayed during production a little bit with them.
I really don't storyboard unless it's an action sequence of some kind, but I plan carefully.
I think that all the anger and cynicism comes from suppressing things that we always wanted.
'The Blind Side' took forever to get it out of 20th Century Fox in turnaround. It was one of three different movies I was involved with then. 'The Blind Side' just happened to be the one that got made.
I think that, anybody with a strong will to tell a story, then that is fantastic. I think it's fantastic. I think sometimes people have what I'll call an ulterior motive with a story.
We have the word 'Mc' attached to so many things now, like 'McMansions.' It's become part of our vernacular as something on steroids almost, just bigger and bigger. I think, to a degree, studios have fallen prey to that as well.
