How do you fight when you're trying to pull somebody's arms off or twist their head off? That makes for a different kind of fight.
After 'Inconvenient Truth,' we hit a tipping point where almost everybody in America cares about the environment.
You're fearless when you're a kid.
Of course I went and got 'Breaking Dawn' at midnight the night it came out and read it instantly. I was like, 'Yes!'
There are 2,000 young-adult novels published a year, and hardly any of them ever break out.
Everything is so aggressively marketed at every age: if you're not in Baby Gap, you're not cool. That's how everybody's grown up, so they don't even know it could be another way.
The boys in junior high get really lewd and say outrageous stuff to the girls. If somebody yelled the stuff at me that I've heard at junior high schools I've visited, I'd be scared and humiliated.
The script for 'Thirteen' is tight, and not because of the now-famous six day writing spree, but more because it started out as 15 pages longer.
If you decide to tell a kid that looks don't matter, she can prove you wrong every day. Because they see it everywhere. That is age-old, going back to the Greeks, but now we're bombarded nonstop.
I've had meetings where there were literally, like, 12 angry men in a room and me. And even when everyone shot me down, I somehow dug in one more time.
Being in construction my whole life - I was trained as an architect - I always had to work with guys. And I always did my homework and then challenged them to figure it out faster than me. They don't want to be shown up by a woman.
So many images are saying to girls, 'Show a lot of skin and look gorgeous and sexy.'
Kids have to experiment a little or figure out where they belong.
I've worked on really big budget movies as a designer - 'Vanilla Sky,' 'Three Kings;' I've been in that world, and you can just see people get nervous.
There are some moments where you're so depressed, you cannot see the way, and you're like, 'Whatever. Bite me.' I think all directors feel that way sometimes.
You don't watch 'A Beautiful Mind' and say, 'This is how every mathematician is.'
We can learn from everybody.
I think at any age, you can stay open and creative and excited.
For a film, when you condense, you don't want to keep going back to the same setting over and over.
I respect all the teenagers I work with and feel that everything they have to say is just as valuable as anything I have to say.
