One of the great things about being a director as a life choice is that it can never be mastered. Every story is its own kind of expedition, with its own set of challenges.
Confidence is preparation in action.
It was always my dream to be a director. A lot of it had to do with controlling my own destiny, because as a young actor you feel at everyone's disposal. But I wanted to become a leader in the business.
Humor is unavoidable. It might not feel funny in the moment, but more often than not there's a light at the end of the tunnel.
Death can be experienced once, winning maybe more, but losing can happen all the time.
I think it's in our nature to try to get beyond that next horizon. I think that when we as a species are scratching that itch we're actually following an evolutionary compulsion that is wired into us. I think good things come of it. That's the philosophical side.
If I had to choose between a great acting job and a good directing job, I'd choose the directing job.
You're always a little surprised when something really takes off.
Every religion, in my opinion, has something to bring, and I think we all learn from everyone that there's no right, perfect way to look at something.
I think the most important thing really was that you could take very personal ideas and present them to an audience in entertaining ways.
I've just looked for ideas and great characters that I relate to and that I think I can offer something to the audience, and I no longer look at them as experiments or genre exercises at all.
I'm not a caterer. I just have to stay with my creative convictions. At some point, you have to just get past the special-interest groups and do what you're there to do, which is make a movie.
Sports always works for us more allegorically or metaphorically and that's what's fantastic about why we love them. You demonstrate the limits to which a human being can go and they keep pushing the boundaries of that.
There's a very real argument that the minute we are capable of going to a planet, whether it's Mars or another one, and inhabiting it, that we really should.
I think more and more scientists are becoming convinced that it's very likely that life forms of some kind exist all around the universe not so far from us.
I've acted with all types, I've directed all types. What you want to understand as a director, is what actors have to offer. They'll get at it however they get at it. If you can understand that, you can get your work done.
It was always hard to find stories that I felt were, in and of themselves, fresh enough and intriguing enough .
The sooner we become a multi-planet species, the safer the species is, and the stronger the guarantee that we're going to continue to evolve.
When Apollo 13 appeared as an opportunity and I began to tackle that in as authentic a way as I possibly could, I really became enthralled by the philosophical side of space travel, and why we need to explore - what it means to us here on Earth - all of those things. I became a huge proponent.
A long time ago, I stopped trying to look at projects as genre exercises.
You reach a point where you say you're not going to do juveniles any longer.
I just don't think of myself as an actor much at all, so I don't lust after any particular roles.
3-D is a truly exciting possibility.
Of course, I was completely enthralled by the space program as a kid - particularly Apollo 11 - and was glued to the television like most of the world. Then I stopped thinking about it too much. I was a little disappointed that they weren't going on to Mars at the time, but I didn't think much of it. I was more interested in becoming a director at that point in my life and falling in love, things like that.
