I am an entrepreneur, but not in the conventional sense. I have learnt business as time passed, but I do not have a B-school education.

I think success is what you make of it - of course there is always the factor of luck, but one should always be equipped to seize the moment when opportunity knocks.

People make the assumption that you're only interested in one thing based on the most recent thing you've done. But some directors can be pretty promiscuous about their tastes, and that's how I want to challenge myself.

I really look forward to that opportunity to be a student and discover things. That keeps it interesting for me. And I sometimes get easily bored, and there are still some things I wanna talk about instead of repeating something.

There's only a certain number of movies I'm going to get made, and it's important to me that they each be original somehow.

A sex scene is gratuitous when it only exists for its own sake.

Romantic comedy has come to mean a couple of moderately talented actors placed in implausible situations obliged to go through a set of paces that are all too familiar, the end result being neither romantic nor comedic.

One resists categorization at one's peril.

The promise of an action movie to a certain audience is not a bad thing.

People tend not to dwell on drama.

There's a great tradition of actors taking on parts of much less obvious sympathy.

Often, romantic comedies exist in a vacuum, and it's kind of odd.

The Mitch Rapp novels are as thrilling and entertaining as they are relevant. I am delighted to be given the opportunity to translate them to the screen.

I think every culture - you can call it an American Ronin, a medieval knight errant, you could talk about 'Shane.' There is an archetype that I think is actually common to a lot of cultures, and even the Clint Eastwood stuff was probably as influenced by the Japanese stuff, and yet done by an Italian.

I think there is a very powerful wish that we all have of being self-contained and having sort of opted out or choosing to remove ourselves from society and to have no ties and no obligations, and even no possessions. To be free in a particular way.

The phone that you carry around with you. It's not just that it's a locator for anybody who wants to actually find out where you are, but it's also a leash. It's a reminder just how tethered you are.

Stories are one of the means by which a culture preserves its identity.

I like to reveal people with some of the niceties of social behavior stripped away and the moral, ethical, and political issues are revealed.

You can't help but reveal your bias, and you can't but invest personally in any story that you tell.

If I try to think objectively about myself and my work, I would say I want to be intuitive and distinctive.

Scale is not just something that a director wants so as to play with all the toys. Scale also lends verisimilitude, to put together a real world.

The Beatles in 1963 came to America and became international celebrities, but Bobby Fischer was one of the first, as Elvis was, more in terms of the message created around him.

You have to make choices always. It's about the omission of something for the sake of another.

The most interesting thing to me in chess are not the gambits. Or the moves. It's the mental toughness.