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A movie is like a tip of an iceberg, in a way, because so little of what you do in connection with making a movie actually gets into the movie. Almost everything gets left behind.

Movies are a complicated collision of literature, theatre, music and all the visual arts.

Sometimes you do a film because the script is amazing, sometimes you do it because you get to work with amazing people, and sometimes you do a film because they pay you money.

Movies are visual, aural, they involve people, and life, and ideas and art, they are so elastic. They can hold anything, withstand everything, and make you feel anything. Other arts can do that, but movies are the only ones that can incorporate other media into cinema.

A film is - or should be - more like music than like fiction. It should be a progression of moods and feelings. The theme, what's behind the emotion, the meaning, all that comes later.

A movie is a filmed rehearsal in a way. The audience doesn't know that because you're taking out the things that don't work. There's no comparison to the theater because it's live. But making a movie is just as challenging and exciting, I find. A movie is pure process. The theater is the result of process.

Making a film is like making a mixtape. You're collecting all this stuff and putting your favorite stuff into it: you have actors that you like, characters that you're interested in, moments you want to explore, themes you want to deal with, music that you want to put in. It's a pastiche of all these things that deal with how you see the world.

Movies are all about plot. Theater, even if it's story heavy, it's about ideas.

People go to see a film because it's a great story and it's visually exciting to watch.

With a movie you're creating from the beginning this particular work, let's not call it work of art, because very few movies are works of art, let's just call them bits of popular culture, whatever they are, sometimes very rarely by accident a movie becomes a work of art.