If America had a motto, it would be pull yourself up by the bootstraps, work harder than the next guy, have a goal and achieve it.
I got an English degree in college and then went to law school because I didn't know what else to do. I was a lawyer in Houston, Texas. I started writing plays and screenplays, and after about three years of practicing, I decided I would move to Los Angeles and give it a shot.
We have the word 'Mc' attached to so many things now, like 'McMansions.' It's become part of our vernacular as something on steroids almost, just bigger and bigger. I think, to a degree, studios have fallen prey to that as well.
Every director knows it is his job to be manipulative. When you make an edit, you are trying to manipulate.
Every generation comes upon the movie again, and then, invariably, the books have a spike in sales because people want to read more about Mary Poppins.
Many years ago, I was a producer on a movie called 'My Dog Skip.' Willie Morris, the great southern writer, had written the book. We had adapted it and taken 17 years of his life and compressed it into one year.
'Snow White and the Huntsman' was - I came in before they started shooting and basically worked on Charlize Theron's character for the most part. I guess I probably worked four or five weeks on that one and stayed during production a little bit with them.
I grew up in a refinery town in Texas, and we weren't fancy enough to have a McDonald's.
I just hope, every now and then, the studios still slip one of my movies in.
You set out to tell a good story. You don't do it because there is a deep message involved, because the movie is almost always bad when you do that. Your job No. 1 is for it to be entertaining, and if it's inspiring, that is great, too.
We felt a responsibility to the McDonald brothers and to Ray Kroc to be as factual as possible. We didn't have a responsibility to make anyone look good or anybody look bad, just to try our best to be honest.
I think that, anybody with a strong will to tell a story, then that is fantastic. I think it's fantastic. I think sometimes people have what I'll call an ulterior motive with a story.
I like some time away to recharge the batteries, not only physically but emotionally, so that I get to the point where I'm just dying to direct again, and then that's the right time to do it again.
We did not go to that many movies in a theater in the little town I grew up in.
I really don't storyboard unless it's an action sequence of some kind, but I plan carefully.
I remember going to McDonald's for the first time probably when I was in college. And then I remember going and visiting a friend in Wyoming, and he said, 'We're going to do something special. We're going to McDonald's.'
Somebody might say that they always wanted to be a fly-fishing guide in Montana and maybe they'll never get to do that but just by the virtue of having said it out loud, I think there's some power in that.
A good deed is a good deed.
Whenever a film has three different release dates, people understandably assume that there must be something wrong with it.
I didn't know the books and certainly didn't know the tragic origin story of Mary Poppins in 1906 Australia.
