To me the director’s job is to leave it in better shape than you found it, literally.
We [people] are a species that's wired to tell stories. We need stories. It's how we make sense of things. It's how we learn.
If you're sitting around thinking what other people think about your work, you'll just become paralysed.
I'm probably more character-driven than plot-driven. It's rare for me to attach myself to an idea for a story.
I want to thank anyone who spends part of their day creating...anybody who spends part of their day sharing their experience with us-I think this world would be unlivable without art and I thank you.
You’re supposed to expand your mind to fit the art, you’re not supposed to chop the art down to fit your mind.
In the land of ideas, you are always renting.
There's a big difference between a movie about relationships and a movie in which people talk about relationships. It seems like a lot of people have confused the two.
When things go right it's hard to figure out why, but when things go wrong it's really easy.
If you're going to make a movie for ten thousand you can talk everybody into doing it for free. You could make a really good-looking movie right for ten grand, if you have an idea.
There's a difference between failures and things that are bad.
"A meteor hits planet Earth" - that's a story idea but that doesn't give me any indication of what the character is.
In nature, if a cell gets too big, it divides. You can't come up with a set of rules that's going to work for 350 million people. You're just not.
I can make a movie about Lee Harvey Oswald and make you feel what he feels and make you understand why he believes what he believes. That doesn't mean I think you should go out and shoot JFK.
Everything is the director's fault - you can quote me on that. There are no excuses.
There are people who are originals and the stuff they make really is new. It isn't based on anything else. But I've decided I'm not that-I was never that. My abilities are to synthesize a wide range of references and ideas into something that feels relatively unified and coherent.
I've begun to believe more and more that movies are all about transitions, that the key to making good movies is to pay attention to the transition between scenes. And not just how you get from one scene to the next, but where you leave a scene and where you come into a new scene. Those are some of the most important decisions that you make. It can be the difference between a movie that works and a movie that doesn't.
We have to have a version of our own story that we keep telling ourselves that allows us to get up in the morning. This version of yourself is what you sell to yourself. I think it necessarily includes ... not looking at certain things. Everybody's got some blind spot.
You can't get good at anything unless you do it day in and day out, over and over.
I always have a plan, but then I'm always ready to throw the plan out, and everyone's ready to make a radical left turn if necessary.
What are the stories you want people to tell about you?
We're all standing on the shoulders of what other people have done. But you're supposed to take that and add your own sauce. It can be intimidating, believe me.
A real litmus test for me is how people treat someone who is waiting on them. That's a dealbreaker for me.If I were on the verge of getting into a serious relationship and I saw that person be mean to a waiter... I'm out.
Truth and facts have to trump partisanship. There has to be something that's true regardless of what your angle is on it.
You can create meaning where there was none, you can create feeling where there was none, you can create narrative where there was none. Two frames can be the difference between something that works and something that doesn't. It's fascinating.
