We'd be working in our motel room through the night, and I'd come up with an idea at two in the morning, and he'd start jumping up and down, pacing across the room, or whatever.
I got in trouble in film school at USC because one of my Super-8 movies there, in the first semester, involved a snowmobile chase scene. I made an action scene, and they were like, 'That wasn't what you were supposed to be doing.'
In 1905 Albert discovered Relativity, in 1906 he invented Rock and Roll.
I have to shoot and work out and play and discover all the time.
I've recently enjoyed the Paul Thomas Anderson commentaries and the David Fincher commentaries.
I'm not the greatest reader. I feel like I have a bit of dyslexia or something, and that's probably why I became a filmmaker. I have the need to communicate, the need to tell stories; and the need to understand stories led me to movies.
There would always be a vote. There were always conflicts and arguments for years and years - that's why we're not together anymore. But there was always a vote. It was always two out of three.
I didn't feel the kind of joy every day playing drums that I thought you were supposed to feel.
Soon I learned that the worse the puns and jokes, the funnier they could be, if you knew how to deliver them.
My movement from painting to film was a very conscious one.
It's not OK to fail. It's that things can fail and absolutely will go wrong - just keep trying, keep trying, keep trying.
Perhaps it sounds ridiculous, but the best thing that young filmmakers should do is to get hold of a camera and some film and make a movie of any kind at all.
It is the idea that it's a movie in a movie. So I did it.
You have to have empathy, knowledge and compassion for your characters if you're a writer.
I had given up the theater and everything propelled me into entertainment. And I didn't resist it.
Art is a sense of magic.
In other countries, it's a common thing to have outcast children running around the streets in packs, and I don't think we're so far away from it here.
Here's the thing about 'Cabin in the Woods.' I did virtually no research on this movie.
Like anything, I think there are some wonderful found footage movies, and there are some less good. Certainly when it's done well, I really love it. I really love it as a genre.
That's why 'The Bourne Identity' has that sort of shaky style, because for the most part, Matt Damon and I were sneaking around Paris and shooting where we didn't have permits.
If you don't get it right, what's the point?
Well I don't think I've scored my life exclusively to Ray Charles.
I am trained, and I did do 'The Nutcracker' in its right form, but at the time, they told me I was black and I'd never be in 'Swan Lake.' I went through all those prejudices in the ballet community, and I still emerged wonderfully trained and found my way to Alvin Ailey where there were familiar faces.
No director directs 'Game of Thrones' without reading all the episodes and knowing what's going on. All the episodes are written in advance, so you can do that, which is an important point.
When I finish a film, I want to forget it. I never like to repeat myself. Maybe, when I am dead, they will find certain consistencies in the style of my films, but I never want one film to look like another.
Jordan is a very secular, Westernized country in some respects.
I will not cut my film because, because, because, because of the Wonderful Wizard of Oz.
The original Spencer Tracy version of 'The Old Man and the Sea' was always terribly flawed because of the over-reliance on voice over, but it's still a beautiful movie.
It's not our job to play judge and jury, to determine who is worthy of our kindness and who is not. We just need to be kind, unconditionally and without ulterior motive, even - or rather, especially - when we'd prefer not to be.
My zombie films were all sort of satirical, with political messages. So I was doing them inexpensively and quietly off in left field somewhere.
Age is something that doesn't matter, unless you are a cheese.
I find it preferable not to have public opinions about anything. It's good for me to shut up.
It's because we are so flooded with American culture that we're startled when we see ourselves up there on the screen.
Being part of a team helped me so much. I know the fact that there was a man in the room with me all those years made the medicine go down. I had made the companies money. I didn't have to start, like a lot of women, from ground zero. My path was not the same as a woman starting out by herself.
My mom had very low expectations for me, and she really had a point. I was a big problem at seventeen. If I had a kid like me, I would have those same expectations.
My experience on 'The West Wing' was, I think, now rare in that I was pretty young, and I walked into this environment where Aaron Sorkin was giving me a script every week, and Thomas Schlamme and John Wells were keeping the studio off my back, at least as best as they could.