I look at other filmmakers and see skills in them that I wish I had but I know that I don't. I feel like I have to work really hard to keep myself afloat, doing what I do. But I find it pleasurable.
The ought to be a worldwide cultural taskforce that just stops you when you have ideas like combining The Red Desert with an armored car heist movie.
It would be nice if all people who saw movies had some sort of basic understanding of what they're looking at, but I don't think you can assume that.
To me the director's job is to leave it in better shape than you found it, literally.
A lot of people get very misty-eyed about celluloid. When I think of the time that's wasted in sending it back to the lab and having it developed and brought back, it would make me insane. I love getting my hands on the stuff immediately. That doesn't work for everybody. It just works for me.
As vocal as some people have been about how emotionally attached they've been to celluloid, I've been equally emotional in my stance that nothing is more valuable than this. Than being able to see the result of your work quickly.
I'm very comfortable with failure. I'm very comfortable being the guy who disappoints people.
But my sense in talking to people when I travel is that the film business is not that dissimilar from a lot of other businesses.
I had more fun making Traffic than either of the Ocean's films.
Lying is like alcoholism. You are always recovering.
When a film like Chris Nolan's Memento cannot get picked up, to me independent film is over. It's dead.
I know why we can't have a frank discussion with our policymakers - if you're in the government or in law enforcement you cannot acknowledge that drugs are anything but inherently evil and morally wrong.
I'm a big believer in volume. If I made three times as many movies as Stanley Kubrick, that must mean I'm three times as good.
Well, it's 15 years since Sex, Lies And Videotape, and if you hang around long enough you're having the same arguments with just a new set of people every few years and it gets boring.
One of the reasons why I think virtual reality, as a narrative format, is never going to go beyond the short-form immersion space is because the bedrock of visual storytelling is the reverse angle. If you can't look into the eyes of the protagonist, you cannot hold people's attention for more than 15 minutes.
