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A real litmus test for me is how people treat someone who is waiting on them. That's a dealbreaker for me.If I were on the verge of getting into a serious relationship and I saw that person be mean to a waiter... I'm out.
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I have a friend whose theory is that you're from wherever you went to high school. I think that's mostly true.
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What's great about things like Kickstarter is that it enables me, finally, and without any bad feeling at all, when people come up to me now saying, "I want to do this." I can just go, "There are no excuses anymore."
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If I'm a director and I read a script and I say yeah I really want to do this, I would never walk away because the deal wasn't very good - that I wasn't getting paid very much or that the chances that I would see anything on the back end were remote because of the financial waterfall and the way it's structured. I would never use that as a reason not to do something.
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People are sort of numb to watching violence, but sexual activity is still as strong as it ever was in terms of generating response.
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I try to use other songs or bands as reference points - it seems like the easiest way to get across what are really differences of taste or opinion. If you know what kind of music somebody loves, then you can kind of figure out why they do what they do.
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We're all standing on the shoulders of what other people have done. But you're supposed to take that and add your own sauce. It can be intimidating, believe me.
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If you're a painter and you want people to know who you are and recognize your work, you've got to build some long-term value.
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Whenever you experiment with something, it's very easy to take the emotion out of it. And going back and forth between wanting to be respected artistically and wanting to move people is its own challenge.
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My experience over the years with working with people who are not actors or not trained actors is that you have to get to know them well enough to see what they have that's translatable onto the screen.
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I look at other filmmakers and see skills in them that I wish I had but I know that I don't. I feel like I have to work really hard to keep myself afloat, doing what I do. But I find it pleasurable.
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I like a lot of different kinds of movies, I like a lot of different kinds of paintings.
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I just find it annoying that in these sequences of the fight scenes, traditionally, there's music trying to pump you up. I don't like that, personally, as an audience member. This just reflects my taste.
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My first three movies, I didn't start editing until we were finished shooting. That's unthinkable to me now.
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I'm a grinder. I'll beat you because I will not sleep.
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There's a technical reason why I think that frame rate is weird and it has to with your brain's ability to scan beyond a certain rate. The point is I find it looks weird.
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The best set was probably 'Bloody Sunday.' We had no money for extras and gambled on months of outreach to persuade the people of Derry to turn out and march for us on one single afternoon. And they did. In their tens of thousands. Seeing them march, their patience and their dignity and their commitment, I knew the movie would have a quality of truth.
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We people are a species that's wired to tell stories. We need stories. It's how we make sense of things. It's how we learn.
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The art model of problem solving is incredibly efficient because ideology has no place there.There's only the thing and what the thing needs to be.
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I was thinking that people have to believe you're crazy in order to take you seriously as an artist. If you're wandering the streets, talking in gibberish, nobody ever asks you to change anything about your art because there's no context for people to look at what you do.
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Once I had a potentially heart attack-inducing eight double espressos in one day. I think my assistant secretly swaps my coffees for decaf as she doesn't want me to die of caffeine overdose.
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I can make a movie about Lee Harvey Oswald and make you feel what he feels and make you understand why he believes what he believes. That doesn't mean I think you should go out and shoot JFK.
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I had more fun making Traffic than either of the Ocean's films.
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I think the feeling that we're going to work together again usually starts to come up before the first project's even done. The Black Keys and I have already talked about starting on something new.