Entertainment has to come hand in hand with a little bit of medicine.
It’s a very American thing to hide away from death.
Take ownership of every decision you make because you will be held responsible for the film, whether good or bad.
I always say everyone was lucky enough to be in a Cate Blanchett movie.
I don’t know how to depict intelligence.
I like characters who don’t change, who don’t learn from their mistakes.
A movie is made for an audience and a film is made for both the audience and the film-makers.
If I could be anyone, it would be Brad Pitt.
Hollywood is great. I also think it’s stupid and small-minded and shortsighted.
In film, we sculpt time, we sculpt behavior and we sculpt light.
I learn the most from making my own mistakes.
I loved Luke Skywalker and I loved Darth Vader and I loved watching them work it out.
Perfume is pretty good because nobody has to hold the product by their face or use it.
Movies aren’t finished, they’re abandoned. And you have to make your peace with that.
I have demons you can’t even imagine.
I don’t have the Tom Hanks fans. When you make the kind of movies I make, you get weird letters from people.
You can do something that walks a line, and invariably, whatever that line is, it will be crossed by people who don’t know any better and want to ape the success.
When I’m watching somebody act, it’s a behavior editorial function – I look at someone act, and I might say, ‘I don’t believe him when he says that.’ I don’t know why I don’t believe him, probably because the people that I’ve met, they don’t act like that when they say stuff like that and mean it.
For me, the scariest thing about a serial killer is that there’s somebody who lives next door to you, running power tools late into the night, and you don’t know he has a refrigerator full of penises.
For a number of years, I’d been around the kind of people who financed movies and the kind of people who are there to make the deals for movies. But I’d always had this naive idea that everybody wants to make movies as good as they can be, which is stupid.