Casey Affleck is someone I want to work with again. We almost had him on 'Pete's Dragon,' but his scheduling issues didn't work out.
I was raised in a deeply Catholic family. There was a sense that everything we were doing was to prepare ourselves for an afterlife in heaven. In my teenage years, that became less important to me. Eventually, that turned into agnosticism, which became atheism.
A great sense of morality was instilled in me through my upbringing in the Catholic faith - particularly because my father is a moral theologian. And morality is something I believe exists separate from faith, as an intrinsic human quality that one should aspire to understand and participate in.
There are some stories - not even stories, some feelings - that you can't accomplish in cinema without using celluloid.
The relationships I've had with animals are often some of the most profound. That's why you cry when a dog dies in a movie. The connection is so deep and so profound, and it isn't cluttered by humanity.
Making movies is hard for me. Being on set is very trying. I'm not good at being that communicative for that long. Editing is where I'm happiest.
Virginia Woolf's literature really transformed my own ideas about how to formally represent the passage of time and how time affects us. Specifically, the benchmarks are 'Mrs. Dalloway,' 'To the Lighthouse' and 'Orlando,' all of which have time as a central conceit.
With the transcendent or supernatural, they help us contextualize our own lives while we are here on this earth. On a narrative level, as a storyteller, they are a wonderful tool and technique by which to explore those hopes, those fears, those existential dilemmas that we all face from time to time.
I certainly did not envisage making a Disney movie. The most I hoped for was to be able to pay my bills. I was not a go-getter. I was very type-B.
I can't solve a puzzle for the life of me - my brain doesn't work that way. But I can take a very simple idea and extrapolate from it and spend time with it and pull things out of it.
I love film criticism as an art. I think it's a very important thing.
If your financiers care about the movie, they will be involved in a very constructive fashion, but it can get out of hand very quickly, and that is something to be aware of in any type of filmmaking.
I love communicating non-verbally. I find great value in it.
I've never had an actual haunting experience, in the way you might anticipate a ghost in a movie haunting someone, but I do feel presences around me all the time, and I do feel that memories haunt us the way ghosts haunt us or might haunt characters in a film.
I love taking something that is understood to be funny or charming or sweet or naive and instilling it with some degree of gravity.
There is a palpable sense of history in the homes that I choose to occupy. I think that's one of the reasons I gravitate towards old homes: I really like that sense of history and that sense that I am one step in a very long process that trails out in both directions around me - before me and ahead of me.
When you cut from a long shot to a close shot, you're doing it for a reason, or if you let something stay in long shot for a long take. On the short films, I was teaching myself how to express something personal cinematically, how to use the language of film the best I could.
Some filmmakers are great at making complex things and films with a lot of moving parts, and I'm just not that way.
I never rejected religion, but it just ceased to be an overriding concern in my life.
I love 'Peter Pan' to death. It's one of the most influential pieces of storytelling in my life. It made a huge impact on how I grew up. I love the cartoon. I love the 2003 version.
