We build our legacy piece by piece, and maybe the whole world will remember you or maybe just a couple of people, but you do what you can to make sure you're still around after you're gone.
Time goes by so slowly when you're a child, and then, as an adult, it goes by in the blink of an eye.
When I was a kid, Santa, the Tooth Fairy, my stuffed animals - they were real. There is the tremendous suspension of disbelief that you have as a child. It's harder as an adult.
I'm not searching for the meaning of life, but I'm looking for a meaning within my life.
I made 'St. Nick' on a 30-page outline. 'Aint' Them Bodies Saints' was a full-bodied script, but it still had a lot of room for improvisation. There were scenes that weren't there on the page - just a sentence saying something happens. I was like, 'We'll figure this out when we shoot it.'
The first movie I ever saw in the cinema was Walt Disney's 'Pinocchio,' upon its 1984 re-release, which would have put me at three years old.
If your financiers care about the movie, they will be involved in a very constructive fashion, but it can get out of hand very quickly, and that is something to be aware of in any type of filmmaking.
I often conflate the domestic and the cosmic on a daily basis.
I've never had an actual haunting experience, in the way you might anticipate a ghost in a movie haunting someone, but I do feel presences around me all the time, and I do feel that memories haunt us the way ghosts haunt us or might haunt characters in a film.
I'm a deeply romantic person, nostalgic to a fault.
I was raised in a deeply Catholic family. There was a sense that everything we were doing was to prepare ourselves for an afterlife in heaven. In my teenage years, that became less important to me. Eventually, that turned into agnosticism, which became atheism.
I have a repository of titles I like in my head, and I am always looking for a movie that I can put one on.
In dialogue scenes, my favorite moments are when people aren't talking because you can cut to the heart of the matter much more quickly, often with a look. People hide things in words. When you don't have words to hide things in, it becomes much more direct and much more immediate of a connection.
One of my earliest memories, movie-related or otherwise, is of seeing a man dunking a man's head in a toilet on television, and my mom telling me that this is what would happen to me if I ever joined the Army. It wasn't until my senior year in high school that I would discover that this was a scene from 'The Great Santini,' starring Robert Duvall.
There are some stories - not even stories, some feelings - that you can't accomplish in cinema without using celluloid.
With the transcendent or supernatural, they help us contextualize our own lives while we are here on this earth. On a narrative level, as a storyteller, they are a wonderful tool and technique by which to explore those hopes, those fears, those existential dilemmas that we all face from time to time.
I like to make movies in Texas because that's where I learned how to do it. I know the industry there, I know the people, I know the crews. But it's hard to make films in Texas.
Making movies is hard for me. Being on set is very trying. I'm not good at being that communicative for that long. Editing is where I'm happiest.
It's something that you pick up at a history class in college, the idea that history and time is something to which we can't even hold a candle to. We, as human beings, are just a small element in the overarching sweep of narrative history. That really had a profound effect on me, that realization.
A great sense of morality was instilled in me through my upbringing in the Catholic faith - particularly because my father is a moral theologian. And morality is something I believe exists separate from faith, as an intrinsic human quality that one should aspire to understand and participate in.
