The future is now. It’s time to grow up and be strong. Tomorrow may well be too late.
We live in a disposable society. It’s easier to throw things out than to fix them. We even give it a name – we call it recycling.
In a relationship you have to open yourself up.
But for me, it feels like a natural extension of what I’ve been doing: exploring relationships. Here you have two relationships and we can explore how difficult it is for people to be together.
It’s funny how that comes up, because sometimes I’ll write something and I’ll think, I don’t know if that’s a film or a play, and then other things I feel very strongly about them just being plays – they feel very theatrical to me.
I think the more the actor lets you know what he thinks of the character, the less the audience cares – like a comedian who laughs at his own jokes.
Movies are – all I’ve found is that they’re just tougher and tougher to make.
Everyone has a little bit of Howard and Chad in them. I think there’s Christine in all men as well.
There is a lot of absurdity sometimes, not just in Mormonism but often in other religions that want to pretend that no bad happens in their church, rather than taking care of what bad does happen.
I felt, if I’m going to take on some of the most overdone material, which is men and women and affairs and betrayal of friends, I had better have a new take on it. I think my films come from a desperation not to be boring.
I wanted to tell a story that interested me as much in the telling as in the watching.
I would be more frightened as a writer if people thought my movies were like science fiction.
People have perhaps gotten to the point where for the most part movies are a just bit of escape.
Just in the past few years – since I’ve been making movies, which isn’t a very long time – you now have a culture that is fascinated and informed about the box office in a way that sometimes filmmakers weren’t even.
I think Christine and Chad are on the opposite extremes of the spectrum. Christine is a model victim, and Chad is a model perpetrator, and Howard is closer to the middle.
Everyone has a story.
I was always looking for the most dramatic emphasis.
I didn’t choose BYU, I like to think it chose me.
I was very careful to cast guys who were very good-looking and very fit and who had a certain sense of privilege about them, because with that sense of privilege comes contempt.