Otherness is a big thing for me. I'm always drawn to characters that live lives that I couldn't lead.

I had a certain career as an actor that I think was quite personal as well, and had a lot of integrity, but I wasn't writing my own things or directing my own movies.

The best reason to make a film is that you feel passionately about it.

My earliest memories are doing commercials and TV.

I think I'm drawn to films more as a director with a directorial mind even as an actor. I make movies to make the films, not to act.

I make movies about people in spiritual crisis because it's a way for me to spend the time, the energy, the focus and the obsession to come to terms with my own spiritual crisis.

I love more than anything looking at a movie scene by scene and seeing the intention behind it. It allows you to really appreciate the hand of the filmmaker.

I don't like it when reviews aren't about the movie. When they're about how much money somebody made, or who they're sleeping with, or if they got the job via some connection, or about how Fox is putting X amount of dollars into it.

I just want to make movies. I really love movies. I want to be involved with them.

I don't like the outside world to intrude when I'm making a film. I like to either see my family or work, but I don't like to go out.

I think every movie changes me and is life changing, especially movies you direct.

I want to be inspiring to myself, to my kids, my family, and my friends.

If I make two movies my entire life, and they're two movies that - whether they make a lot of money or two people go to see them - they speak of me, then I consider them incredibly successful. I don't need to be Steven Spielberg.

I feel at various times in my life that I've been at a point where I had to choose between a death sentence and a life sentence. And I want to live. What do I do to live? What do I do to be vital? And the answer is always creativity. The answer is always art.

I like to be in a different place when I make a movie so that I can't really focus on anything else, and that is your world.

The world is littered with movies about people that are depressed that either did not come out or are not successful.

I've always had this idea that I wanted movies to make people better not worse.

I had a prodigious life, living in a grown-up world when I was a child. But I think my abilities were about perceptiveness, and they were about examining psychology and examining people and relationships.

I didn't have any ambition to produce big mainstream popcorn movies.

I guess I've played a lot of victims, but that's what a lot of the history of women is about.

I think an artist's responsibility is more complex than people realize.

Cruelty might be very human, and it might be cultural, but it's not acceptable.

I think 'destiny' is just a fancy word for a psychological pattern.

It's an interesting combination: Having a great fear of being alone, and having a desperate need for solitude and the solitary experience. That's always been a tug of war for me.