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'm sentimental to a fault.

If I can't finish a screenplay, if I can't get to the last page as a writer, it probably means it's not a good movie for me to make.

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'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 love taking something that is understood to be funny or charming or sweet or naive and instilling it with some degree of gravity.

At the end of the day on 'Pete's Dragon,' if we didn't nail something, we could come back and pick it up later. I always knew there was a safety net built in that Disney would not let the movie fail. But in this case, with 'A Ghost Story,' it was all on the line.

Casey Affleck is someone I want to work with again. We almost had him on 'Pete's Dragon,' but his scheduling issues didn't work out.

I find myself very attached to the places I live, and moving is never easy for me.

I have a longstanding, unapologetic love for Ke$ha.

My wife and I, we knew each other back in 2001 but had fallen out of touch. One day, I had a dream about her and wrote her a note on Facebook - I was living in L.A. at the time - and that turned into six months of just letter-writing. It started off with Facebook messages and turned into emails and eventually became actual hand-written letters.

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.

I love working with the same people. When I find someone I love and that I like working with, I don't want to stop working with them.

Obviously 'Pete's Dragon' is more commercial than 'A Ghost Story,' but when making them, I'm just trying to tell a story that matters to me, that ultimately would satisfy me as a moviegoer. Because watching movies is my favorite thing to do. I watch a lot of them.

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 love horror films. I love ghost movies and haunted-house movies.

I realized that filmmaking is an eminently scalable act. No matter how big or how small, there's joys and stresses that will all scale themselves magnificently to fit the production.

I'm an atheist. I don't believe in the afterlife, but I do believe in ghosts.

I'm a deeply romantic person, nostalgic to a fault.

I love dialogue, but I'm also terrified of it. In all my movies, I've done my best to cut out as much dialogue as possible. I love the spaces in those silences. Even in 'Pete's Dragon,' I was so happy that the first twenty minutes have about five or six lines of dialogue.

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.

Some filmmakers are great at making complex things and films with a lot of moving parts, and I'm just not that way.

The only part of 'A Ghost Story' that was reactionary was a temporal one. I had spent so much time making 'Pete's Dragon' that I was really impatient and excited to make something new. When this project presented itself, I was ready to jump right into it. I started shooting two days after 'Pete's Dragon.'

I can't watch my movies at their premieres - I learned that lesson the hard way.

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.'

I don't like being pessimistic. I don't like living my life with a nihilistic mindset.

I have so many aspirations and interests that would not fit within the Disney brand. I need to make sure I'm engaging those proclivities as well.

I often conflate the domestic and the cosmic on a daily basis.

I guess you can't really turn a camera on outside in Texas without getting Terrence Malick comparisons.

I love communicating non-verbally. I find great value in it.

When you cut from a long shot to a close shot, you're doing it for a reason, or if you let something stay in long shot for a long take. On the short films, I was teaching myself how to express something personal cinematically, how to use the language of film the best I could.

The very first film I ever made, when I was seven years old, when I got my hands on a camcorder, was a remake of 'Poltergeist,' which I hadn't seen yet because my parents wouldn't allow me to. But I made my own version of it, and it starred my brother in a bed sheet.

The idea that all we have is everything that's come before us, and we are the accumulated weight of our own personal histories, is a beautiful concept. And yet it also leaves you asking, 'Is that all there is? Is that all that defines us? Is that all we have?'

There are some stories - not even stories, some feelings - that you can't accomplish in cinema without using celluloid.

I'm happy to keep making Disney movies.

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.

Grief reveals itself in the most mundane activities, like eating. It's never when you're looking at old pictures.

I never rejected religion, but it just ceased to be an overriding concern in my life.

I know I have trouble watching my own films.

Dramas are incredibly compelling. I feel like 'Silver Linings Playbook' is a drama, but because it's funny, people market it as a comedy.

I love movies. I can't participate in my love of movie-making fully unless I'm producing it.

I think there is a value in leaving the world a little better off, and movies can do that in a minor way.

I love what Paul Thomas Anderson did with 'The Master' with putting out those teasers made up of footage that's not in the movie.

Digital is my safety net. I know how to use it, how to operate those cameras; it makes sense to me. Film is much more mysterious.

You always want your movies to reach the widest audience possible.

Hindsight is the most dangerous thing imaginable for me. I imagine that's the case for most filmmakers. And I would love to be a filmmaker who was an exception to that rule, but I'm certainly not.