I do have that compulsion to organize moments into a larger thing.

A lot of the time, excess on a film set is just damaging.

If you have a vision for something, things are navigable. If it gets fuzzy, then obstacles become much more formidable.

I don't have many rules, but one of them is, 'Do not make a movie you yourself would not want to see.'

I don't like sensationalizing events. Instead of making waves, I want to make everything settle, so we can see to the bottom of things.

Silence is absorption, and when you're watching a film and you're that quiet and you're that still, at least from my experience of watching films, that indicates an absorption, where you're really in the moment. You're really present. What you're seeing is vital to you in that moment, and it's tingling, and it's alive, and it matters.

I really tried to get comfortable with the notion of shooting digital on 'Foxcatcher' and just couldn't. I shot many tests and experimented with all sorts of techniques to manipulate it into a place that worked for us, but it just didn't happen.

I've never even watched one of my films since they're completed.

I think all good sports movies aren't really about sports.

Chemistry exists or it doesn't, and I think casting is a very underappreciated component of filmmaking.

Adam Sandler in 'Punch-Drunk Love' is brilliant. Brilliant, brilliant.

There's really powerful and potentially dominating forces when you make a film that can harm it if you're incapable of orchestrating things.

It's hard. It's hard to get a film made properly.

Making a film is a challenge.

I don't know of a filmmaker who does not feel buoyed and lifted when their peers embrace the work.

When I learned a little bit about du Pont and a little bit about Mark Schultz, I was attracted to the notion that these incredibly different people found each other and seemed, for a moment, to be the answer that each was looking for.

I am attracted to characters who are in worlds where they don't belong and who have great ambitions that they imagine will somehow reconcile themselves with the world and make things right.

Every film requires a different process. You learn about these particular actors and the particular chemistry between these actors. Recognizing when you don't need to shoot a scene because it's going to be cut anyway.

I think when an actor feels like they're being watched with great sensitivity and a subtle eye and a nose for truthfulness, that has some effect.

It's important for an actor to feel like they're really being watched and to receive feedback and encouragement about the aspects of what they're doing that feels truthful - and also to raise awareness when they might be resorting to habits and tricks, which every actor has.

Mark Ruffalo is Mark Ruffalo - no explanation needed. He has the biggest heart of anyone I've ever met, and he's sort of the Dave Schultz of the entertainment industry.

There is a very uneasy relationship between money and creativity, between money and almost everything. Its tendency to control and corrupt - whether it's in arts or education or politics, hardly anything is untouched by it. Journalism certainly is up there. Everything is susceptible to it.

I'm not going to take something based on budget and do something just for the sake of it. I want to make good films.

It's about creating an atmosphere so that characters can just live in front of the cameras. And to be sensitive, and for the actor to know the sensitivity that they are being observed with.