“The more unique your film is and unusual it is and difficult it is, the harder it is to get it financed. That's why a lot of good filmmakers are doing television. They do HBO movies.”

“Bathroom humor, fart, and poo poo humor in movies gets a laugh. It's a pretty easy audience, and that's been around for ages.”

“Everybody's a filmmaker today.”

“I tend to think of action movies as exuberant morality plays in which good triumphs over evil.”

“I had a couple of movies that I was passionately involved with that I could never get made. 'Richard Pryor,' I wrote for - gosh - over a year. That was close to getting made for two-and-a-half years after that. We're still pushing it, you know. It is weird. Suddenly you wake up and it's like, 'God, five years have gone by.'”

“When you make a film you usually make a film about an idea.”

“I love European movies and I kind of grew up on European films.”

“For me, relationships are the real action movies. Bombs are exploding every day and the kitchen is Ground Zero.”

“And being as I'm somebody who loves movies like The Machinist, I also love going along to big mass entertainment movies. I get in the mood for all kinds of movies, and so I like to try each of them.”