“I love doing serious movies for adults.”

“Now on Friday nights, if I want to go hang out with friends, I go hang out with friends. If I want to stay in and be in the hot tub and have people over to watch movies, I do that.”

“There's some movies I watch, they're kind of like my anti-anxiety pill, my anti-depressant pill. I watch them at least once or twice a month probably. And I never stop learning from them as a filmmaker.”

“I'm proud of all the movies I've made. They're not sequels, they're not franchises. And the reason I pick my films carefully is that I don't want to spit on my life. I like to think of myself as more than that.”

“And what I like about it is it makes me happy and I think it makes a lot of people happy to go to the movies and to not think about the problems of the day or the problems of tomorrow or the yesterday and just go on for the ride and have the fun of losing oneself in a fantasy.”

“If you're working on a movie, you want it to be projected on the largest tapestry possible, and the sound to be perfect, and for that kind of communal experience of the movies to take place for it.”

“James Cagney, Steve McQueen, I loved all those guys. I grew up loving the movies but had no desire to be in them.”

“Just because you've made a couple movies, you've done some good movies, you've been nominated for some Academy Awards, whatever, nobody's entitled. It's a business. If they don't see it, I can think they're wrong, but I'm not entitled to a $15 million budget to make a film.”

“I'll be honest with you. My kids don't watch my movies and never have. I can maybe name a film one hand that they've seen, actually, all the way through.”