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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.