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With the black and white films, one was concerned with tone.

Tone is so important because you can have a great script just be ruined with the wrong director - if they shtick it up or something. With 'Little Miss Sunshine,' I was so concerned they weren't going to play the pageant official realistically because you don't have to wink to play those kinds of characters.

I think most of my films all have a certain tone or intensity in them. They are tense, and you kind of anticipate some kind of catastrophe, but you're not quite sure.

Tone is everything in TV.

The music's job is to get the audience so involved that they forget how the movie turns out.

You know, and it really doesn't have a lot to do with the movie. That's the trick to doing a good musical is that, if you take that music number out, there's less to the movie there. You would miss it.

I'm not a big fan of there being voiceovers in movies. I really prefer it when the film tells it story.

For whatever reason, the films I gravitate towards do have these strange sort of tonal balances to them... I kind of realized on '50/ 50' why I liked these blending of tones, because I think it's kind of what life is like: funny one minute, sad the next, scary the next.

Tone is up for grabs in what we do - what's the tone of the scene.

Always when you are doing films, the themes swallow you in one way or another.