I love 'Peter Pan' to death. It's one of the most influential pieces of storytelling in my life. It made a huge impact on how I grew up. I love the cartoon. I love the 2003 version.

When you have a lot going on in a scene - whether it be a lot of shots, a lot of coverage, a lot of edits, or just the amount of content - it can cover up a deficit of true feeling. But when you don't have a lot of material to work with, you really have to be sincere with everything. You really have to mean it, because there's nowhere to hide.

When I'm writing a story, I try to reduce it to the barest possible components and go from there.

I can't solve a puzzle for the life of me - my brain doesn't work that way. But I can take a very simple idea and extrapolate from it and spend time with it and pull things out of it.

Virginia Woolf's literature really transformed my own ideas about how to formally represent the passage of time and how time affects us. Specifically, the benchmarks are 'Mrs. Dalloway,' 'To the Lighthouse' and 'Orlando,' all of which have time as a central conceit.

I have always thought of myself as a writer, only because I need things to direct, and I can't not write the things that I direct.

I like roller coasters that have the one 70-foot drop.

I've always endeavored to make movies with my friends.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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 know I have trouble watching my own films.

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

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

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.

I'm happy to keep making Disney movies.

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

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?'

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.

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.