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I'm happy to keep making Disney movies.
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I often conflate the domestic and the cosmic on a daily basis.
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With 'Pete's Dragon,' Disney was very excited about the movie I wanted to make; they were very supportive of it, and it was a smooth process. I was really surprised by that.
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My wife and I, we knew each other back in 2001 but had fallen out of touch. One day, I had a dream about her and wrote her a note on Facebook - I was living in L.A. at the time - and that turned into six months of just letter-writing. It started off with Facebook messages and turned into emails and eventually became actual hand-written letters.
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I know I have trouble watching my own films.
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I love film criticism as an art. I think it's a very important thing.
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I guess you can't really turn a camera on outside in Texas without getting Terrence Malick comparisons.
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I'm an atheist. I don't believe in the afterlife, but I do believe in ghosts.
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Especially in the Western world, so much of our cultural ideas about grieving is about us, and I think it's important to get beyond that sometimes.
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'Ain't Them Bodies Saints' wound up becoming a love story even though it was not initially meant to be one.
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I realized that filmmaking is an eminently scalable act. No matter how big or how small, there's joys and stresses that will all scale themselves magnificently to fit the production.
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I'm not searching for the meaning of life, but I'm looking for a meaning within my life.
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The idea that all we have is everything that's come before us, and we are the accumulated weight of our own personal histories, is a beautiful concept. And yet it also leaves you asking, 'Is that all there is? Is that all that defines us? Is that all we have?'
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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.
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I had been stopped a couple of times -- once in a Lexus and in a Blazer. Both of the cars had factory sound systems. I understand the citizen's position on noise, but the city was towing cars that didn't have loud sound systems. When it happened to me, I knew there was something wrong.
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One of my favorite rules of writing: stop whenever it's feeling really good so you have something to look forward to the next day.
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Obviously 'Pete's Dragon' is more commercial than 'A Ghost Story,' but when making them, I'm just trying to tell a story that matters to me, that ultimately would satisfy me as a moviegoer. Because watching movies is my favorite thing to do. I watch a lot of them.
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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.
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The only part of 'A Ghost Story' that was reactionary was a temporal one. I had spent so much time making 'Pete's Dragon' that I was really impatient and excited to make something new. When this project presented itself, I was ready to jump right into it. I started shooting two days after 'Pete's Dragon.'
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We build our legacy piece by piece, and maybe the whole world will remember you or maybe just a couple of people, but you do what you can to make sure you're still around after you're gone.
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In the past, I'd been sort of a fan of writing a coat hanger of a script, and something I could hang ideas off of.
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Dramas are incredibly compelling. I feel like 'Silver Linings Playbook' is a drama, but because it's funny, people market it as a comedy.
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The very first film I ever made, when I was seven years old, when I got my hands on a camcorder, was a remake of 'Poltergeist,' which I hadn't seen yet because my parents wouldn't allow me to. But I made my own version of it, and it starred my brother in a bed sheet.
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I don't like being pessimistic. I don't like living my life with a nihilistic mindset.