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As a director, when you embrace a project, you try to understand as much as you can about its world, and you do that by embracing and engaging with people who are in that world. Then it's down to your best instincts, which is what most directing is about anyway.

I view the whole thing as a collaboration. As an actor, I always found that to be the most freeing thing, when the director would collaborate with you, so that together you'd come up with something exponentially better.

I think when you're a director, it's hard to do something unless you're absolutely over-the-moon in love with it. The audience, they spend 90 minutes with it, but for you, it's anywhere between a year and a half to three years of your life, every day, working on it.

As a director, I really wanted to learn and I needed to get away from my own stuff to figure out how to just do things and work with good people.

As a director, you're a bit of a dictator. But I feel that you're a better director if you're open to other people's ideas. It means that it's tougher: you have to be in a choosing process; you have to put the ego aside. As long as everybody's aiming in the same direction... I'm open to my main partners in the film crew.

The director is the ultimate creative arbiter of what's going to happen. And as a director myself, you really appreciate collaborating with people who are trying to help you find what you need and what you want.

As the director, you have it in your mind how you want the part done, how you want someone to do it, and so sometimes you just say, 'Why don't I do it myself?' So for a little role, I'll just do it.

It's really hard as a screenwriter, you feel like you have a vision and then you turn it over to a director and you have to let it go.

Whatever it takes, the job of the director is to be the leader and to get your actors where they need to go. That's a philosophy that I have.