I'm an atheist. I don't believe in the afterlife, but I do believe in ghosts.
I love film criticism as an art. I think it's a very important thing.
Grief reveals itself in the most mundane activities, like eating. It's never when you're looking at old pictures.
David Lynch's 'Fire Walk With Me' has a scene in it that scared me so bad that I don't remember it. I blocked the memory out - repeatedly! I've seen the film two or three times, and I can never remember what it is that scares me.
I like roller coasters that have the one 70-foot drop.
I find myself very attached to the places I live, and moving is never easy for me.
I grew up in a deeply Catholic home. Our parents always encouraged us to march to our own drums, though, so some of us are still Catholic and some are not. That's always going to be a part of me though; little bits of it trickle into my work. Whether it's an embrace or a rejection, I'm not always sure, but I can't avoid it.
In my darkest moments, I have not eaten an entire pie, but I have turned to other baked goods to find solace.
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.
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.
I have always thought of myself as a writer, only because I need things to direct, and I can't not write the things that I direct.
I love working with the same people. When I find someone I love and that I like working with, I don't want to stop working with them.
Digital is my safety net. I know how to use it, how to operate those cameras; it makes sense to me. Film is much more mysterious.
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.'
I love what Paul Thomas Anderson did with 'The Master' with putting out those teasers made up of footage that's not in the movie.
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.
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.
Some filmmakers are great at making complex things and films with a lot of moving parts, and I'm just not that way.
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.
When I'm writing a story, I try to reduce it to the barest possible components and go from there.
When you have a lot going on in a scene - whether it be a lot of shots, a lot of coverage, a lot of edits, or just the amount of content - it can cover up a deficit of true feeling. But when you don't have a lot of material to work with, you really have to be sincere with everything. You really have to mean it, because there's nowhere to hide.
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.
I love communicating non-verbally. I find great value in it.
In dialogue scenes, my favorite moments are when people aren't talking because you can cut to the heart of the matter much more quickly, often with a look. People hide things in words. When you don't have words to hide things in, it becomes much more direct and much more immediate of a connection.
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.
With any movie that gets remade, whether I like the remake or not, I'm glad that I can still go watch the original that I love. If the remake is offering something different, I really value that because I'm having a new experience and adding something new to my life.
One of my earliest memories, movie-related or otherwise, is of seeing a man dunking a man's head in a toilet on television, and my mom telling me that this is what would happen to me if I ever joined the Army. It wasn't until my senior year in high school that I would discover that this was a scene from 'The Great Santini,' starring Robert Duvall.
The first movie I ever saw in the cinema was Walt Disney's 'Pinocchio,' upon its 1984 re-release, which would have put me at three years old.
I'm sentimental to a fault.
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?'
I don't like being pessimistic. I don't like living my life with a nihilistic mindset.
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.
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.
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.
I take a great deal of value in things that are done by hand or executed by hand.
I love horror films. I love ghost movies and haunted-house movies.
I love the Spanish language.
So many of my films involve houses or homes that have been abandoned. People trying to get back home. That's an idea that I keep dealing with.
I love taking something that is understood to be funny or charming or sweet or naive and instilling it with some degree of gravity.
I love movies. I can't participate in my love of movie-making fully unless I'm producing it.
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.
I made 'St. Nick' on a 30-page outline. 'Aint' Them Bodies Saints' was a full-bodied script, but it still had a lot of room for improvisation. There were scenes that weren't there on the page - just a sentence saying something happens. I was like, 'We'll figure this out when we shoot it.'
I think, with 'St. Nick,' when you're working with a smaller budget, you have fewer risks involved. You're able to take chances with style and content.
Dramas are incredibly compelling. I feel like 'Silver Linings Playbook' is a drama, but because it's funny, people market it as a comedy.
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.
No two people who make a movie on a certain budget scale are going to achieve the same thing because it just depends on what sort of favors you can call, and what sort of dynamics you can pull in the play.
I'm someone who is very sentimental and nostalgic and attached to the homes I lived in, and I think moving is a traumatic experience.
It's tough for me to move on from places, even though I realize that it's not only necessary but very important to be able to do so.
I think all people are familiar with thinking about their death and trying to come to terms with the fact that we will, at some point, no longer exist. The loss of one's ego is very tough to reconcile with; you really have to do a lot of mental gymnastics to wrap your head around the idea of just not existing anymore.