Yes, but Hollywood is the strangest place in that they'll torpedo their own film to prove an emotional point.

I admire people who can just brazenly go through the world.

When you have a film that's acclaimed, there's a tendency to go big or get serious or something, but I had an impulse to do the opposite.

My plan B has always been to make a film about people who talk a lot.

Every film's different; every story is so different. But I think I've always been attracted to try to take something minimal and to maximize it cinematically. To find out if I can I really go all the way with one idea.

I lost a year or two in there, trying to get films financed that I didn't know would never get financing.

Hollywood has a way of sucking the world's talent to it.

The human psyche creates structure. We all go through our lives like, 'Oh! And then I moved here.' We're pattern-seeking, structure-producing machines.

I want to make a film about a factory worker.

In interviews, I never wanted to play into the myth of, 'Yeah, I was sitting there doing nothing, and then made 'Slacker.'' No. I'd been making shorts, a Super-8 feature, and running a film society. I always try to stress to people that there's a lot of work involved and years of preparation. But no one wants to hear that part.

I'm a huge Nagisa Oshima fan. He was one of the most radical Japanese directors to come up in the '60s.

I think you get in trouble if you make experimental big studio films.

My working method has always been, 'Work really hard and get it right the first time.'

I think there are more films being made, but there are probably less outlets for them and distributors.

I'm lucky that I get to jump around, do a big-budget comedy and then a smaller film. I don't even make a big distinction between them.

I think I got really lucky with Slacker. That was a film that probably shouldn't have been seen.

Pro athletes, how they go through the world is so elevated. The bubble they're in is one of entitlement. And that starts young. By the time they're in college, they've had it a lot of their life.

There's a long history of people who spent that $300,000 on their first film and weren't quite ready, and then they never did it again 'cause they were out of synch with where they were, and they would never raise that money again.

Everybody just wants to appreciate time as it's passing, to be in the moment. It's the hardest thing to do. You're either in the unknown future that you're working toward, or you're in the past that becomes a little abstract.

We filmmakers are control freaks. For us, it's about bending the elements of a story into existence.

'Slacker' is so not about navel-gazing.

The worst thing is that you used to be able to show interesting films on campuses. Those places are all gone.

The film culture has no room for ideas. The literary culture has some room, but not less than they should, and the academic culture has a lot, but there's no way to communicate it in a wide way.

A lot of Luis Bunuel's later, European films are all great.

It's disappointing to see films become pure entertainment, so that it's not an art form.

Maybe part of being a dad means that the slightest little thing will make me tear up.

I guess I don't have a grandiose view of the world in general, and I never believe it when someone else has a grandiose moment.

Every college player thinks they're on their way. But, delusions aside, I might have toiled in the minor leagues for a bit.

For a lot of us, awareness is merely realizing the extent to which we've been lied to all our lives. You start educating yourself. You become motivated; you follow your muse where it takes you. And you see the world in a different way. You start making decisions based on what you feel is right.

Every stage of filmmaking's important while you're doing it, so I spend most of my time figuring out how to tell the story. I have all these stories and ideas, but it's how to tell the story.

As I get older, my emotions are closer to the surface.

A certain kind of film is a big theatrical film and a certain kind of film isn't. It doesn't bother me so much that you can pick your format.

I do find myself at the moment, due to the success of School of Rock, to be on people's radar a little.

It's just too late to ban all guns. There are 300 million. We should've done that after the Civil War - that's when we should've taken away guns and defined what militias were. But we didn't do it then, and we can't now.

I wrote a script - a script about a guy working on the automobile assembly line; I never could get money for that. I did a pilot about minimum wage workers for HBO that didn't get picked up; they thought it was depressing, even though it was a comedy.

You learn from everybody.

I loved 'Goodbye to Language.'

I try to avoid bad experiences.

I'm not enough of one of those public personalities who feels as though he's been one-dimensionalized. I don't feel that strongly enough.

I've made movies where people say it's their favourite, but they don't take it seriously because it just didn't seem to break through commercially.

I just love being on a movie set. I like making movies.

The best thing for your psyche as you try to accomplish anything, really, is to just concentrate on all the little things. And not just as a means to an end, but truly enjoy them.

I did The Newton Boys and during the whole process of making the film, I may have spent a week in Los Angeles.

The natural phenomenon of the universe is so mind-blowing, but you have to know about it. You have to be curious. You've got to find it on your own. If you're lucky, you do.

I don't see the arts as competitive at all. It was a better angel of my nature. Sports is zero-sum: winner, loser, demonstrable.

I've never been a guy who had more than a toe in Hollywood anyway, so my toe is more easily lopped off than most.

Storytelling is powerful; film particularly. We can know a lot of things intellectually, but humans really live on storytelling. Primarily with ourselves; we're all stories of our own narrative.

We emphasize negativity and violence in the media because that's what grabs everybody's attention, but in the real world, it's mostly people being very cooperative and caring and connected and kind. That's the norm of human experience. And yet, what gets our attention is the very opposite.

Before Sunrise did very well internationally. It made as much in Italy and Korea as it did here.

I'm kind of an old theater guy, so I'm sort of attuned to it. Like, when I go to New York, I go to plays.