Working with David Cronenberg or Darren Aronofsky or even Steven Soderbergh isn't really like a typical Hollywood movie. These are true artists and have a certain amount of freedom when they work and they're more like independent filmmakers making their way through big studios.

A filmmaker has almost the same freedom as a novelist has when he buys himself some paper.

I am a filmmaker. That is all I've ever been. You know Martin Scorsese makes films about the mob. And I make movies about food.

I'm a filmmaker who decided to go to culinary school. All I picked up was the fact if I didn't understand what was going on with every single ingredient I could be qualifying for like the lunch food job at my daughter's school.

There's so many things I want to do. I want to work with great filmmakers great actors great scripts. And there's no reason for me to do anything short of that because I'm 24 I don't have a family I don't need to make tons of money and I'm not dying to get famous.

When I did 'E.T. ' it sort of solidified the only family I know are these film crews. These gypsies. These filmmakers. That was the solidification and the clicking revelations of 'This is what I want to do with my life and this is where I'm going to survive.'

Louis Malle was the best filmmaker I've ever worked with. He was such an artist. He was dealing with the theme of innocence and experience.

Working with HBO was an opportunity to experience creative freedom and 'long-form development' that filmmakers didn't have a chance to do before the emergence of shows like 'The Sopranos.'

Capitalism would have never let me be a filmmaker living in Flint Michigan with a high school education. I was going to have to make that happen myself.

I was very inspired by Les Blank's film 'Burden of Dreams.' I think what's unique about his film and the two I've made is that they're close examinations of filmmakers and how their own emotional experiences reflect in the material they're rendering and vice versa - how that material sometimes colors their own lives.

A lot of young filmmakers bring their movies to my dad because he always gives lots of good editing ideas and notes. He'd be a good film professor.

It's up to the courage of the filmmakers to make art in cinema not just business. John was rejected by studios he borrowed money and did movies with his own money. You're either courageous or not. You have to find a way.

I already have legitimacy as a filmmaker and now I'm trying to do stuff that's just fun. Until I find a cool tangible subject again that I want to tackle.

You know my dad wasn't a photographer or filmmaker by profession but on Sundays he would take pictures of me and my family or his pals horseback riding and it was a means of communication and affection a means of not being so dysfunctional with each other.

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.

The world is a crazy beautiful ugly complicated place and it keeps moving on from crisis to strangeness to beauty to weirdness to tragedy. The caravan keeps moving on and the job of the longform writer or filmmaker or radio broadcaster is to stop - is to pause - and when the caravan goes away that's when this stuff comes.

My favorite laser disk ever was the laser disk for The Graduate which had a commentary track that wasn't even the filmmakers it was a professor some film criticism guy who just happen to be this amazing commentator who went off into the whole theory of comedy.