Quotes

If you want to stay in cinema, you either have to go very very big or very very small or if you want to go into the movie business that I thought I was leading myself towards, you have to go into television in America now, which is probably the best stories and the best acting and the most interesting material -- a lot of it's on television.

[on the process of screen-writing] They pay for a couple of week to come dig some holes in the ground. When you start digging, sometimes there's nothing there. And sometimes, you get hot.

The movie business has fundamentally changed, as anybody who's got their eyes open knows, and it's never changing back. I don't even know if it should. And in this new movie environment, if you want to play with a larger audience, you have to find something that interests you and that interests them.

[on film-making] I am very preparatory. But this is like having kids or something: if you knew what you were into from the start, you'd never do it. But then you fall in love a little bit more each day, and you keep marching forward and every day is fun. As long as you don't look at the whole thing at once.

In general, the movies that I like have a singular voice. You get some really strong point-of-view all the way through. The more concentrated, consolidated and ballsy that it is, those are our best films. And there are anomalies along the way, but in general that's what works and the system does not nurture that. The system now doesn't respond too it, doesn't reward it, and is afraid of it.

I never believed the Writers Guild should fight for creative rights. I was always against the creative rights thing and that we should strictly be about economics. It's no secret what a militant I am about that. But creative rights are something that you wake up with every morning. And when you endorse a check you're making a contract with yourself as much as anyone else. The idea is still king. Spend 90% of your time working on the idea.

[on whether current movies are too gratuitously violent] We spasm through these cycles of self-reflection and hopefully there's a residue that comes from each one of these things that has some sort of effect. I'm not a cultural theologian the way I should be, I suppose. I don't know the real answer to that. You make your own personal decisions every day about what to do and what lines you wouldn't cross.