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You always fear when you're making a movie that has a moral to the story that people are going to reject the idea of being taught a lesson.

In some ways, what I learned is that you can take a character and breathe with them, and it's up to the audience to interpret rather than you putting moral stamp on the character.

People look for morals in fiction because there has always been a confusion between fiction and philosophy.

Everything I learned I learned from the movies.

Even I haven't downed enough L.A. Kool-Aid to believe that somehow Hollywood movies are an overt instrument of morality.

I learned a lot about critics, not to really take them too seriously about movies.

I picked up 'On Moral Fiction' in the bookstore and looked up myself in the index, but I didn't read it through. I try not to read things that depress me.

Every movie I make teaches me something. That's why I keep making them.

I had taken a course in Ethics. I read a thick textbook, heard the class discussions and came out of it saying I hadn't learned a thing I didn't know before about morals and what is right or wrong in human conduct.

Good action films - not crap, but good action films - are really morality plays. They deal in modern, mythic culture.