I love cooking. My Italian mother is a genius cook, and I picked that up from her. I make my own sauce, which takes four hours, from a recipe that's been refined over many years. I won't tell anybody what it is.
We have to start processing what we're really made of in America. American character is not dead. American integrity and honesty are not dead. When we're backed up against the wall against the largest corporations in the history of corporations, it's there.
When you work with people for a long time, you start to sense what they are thinking without having to communicate explicitly.
I'm a night owl, and luckily my profession supports that. The best ideas come to me in the dead of night.
When you can light your water on fire due to methane contamination in your ground water, what else can you do but laugh?
I don't believe we're only motivated by our own self-interests. Often out of crisis comes this enormous wellspring of generosity and motivation.
What we've got is the wholesale embrace of fracking domestically, internationally and for export. And this couldn't be further from what we really need to do to address climate change.
The BP spill was the greatest environmental catastrophe in U.S. history. Yet somehow, gas companies like BP and Halliburton ran interference on reporting that story.
I think the audience know which films are aimed at their pocket, and which films are aimed at their soul. There are a lot of films out there made by people who are genuinely trying to make a change.
People treat citizens like they're some kind of unreliable source, but citizens are data. They are a data set.
First of all, the idea that natural gas is better than coal is a lie, especially when it comes to fracking for natural gas. It is a lie that was bought into by a lot of Democrats and a lot of environmentalists because I think they wanted to have a win against something; against coal.
A lot of people are deeply dissatisfied by the diminishing control they have over their lives, because of the way our system of government is set up, to cater to the powerful, cater to the wealthy, cater to the corporations, and not to the individual American citizen.
We all know that we have to get off of fossil fuels. And we know that the world is going in that direction. And we have to do it fast.
History is often best told from the ground, out of a car window or in someone's kitchen, not through some huge production mechanism or grand framing device.
I think we're in an era of unprecedented dominance by corporations. I think people understand that deeply; I don't think that's even questioned.
Natural gas is a dirty fossil fuel like the rest of them.
With moviemaking, the audience always has to keep asking, 'What happens next?' If you have the wrong piece of music over a scene, people aren't going to get the scene. If you have the wrong camera angle, people aren't going to pay attention. That's as much a part of the process as getting people to talk to you.
I'm a theater guy and a filmmaker. So when my community was thrown up in the air by the gas industry, the way I could contribute was to do something in the film world. I never thought it would be a big deal at all.
Watching a film should feel like you just tore a hole out of the air and the void caught fire.
'Memorial Day' is about 'spring break' girls-gone-wild culture which is the seedy underbelly of our American Puritanism, the inverse side of the coin. It's also about how we forcefully exported that culture and then pretended to not know what we were doing.
