Making movies is a very different experience in a lot of ways. It's difficult when you're used to owning the copyright and having a landlord's possessory rights - I rent my plays to the companies that do them and if I'm upset I can pull the play. But the only two directors I've worked with are pretty great.

Lord of the Rings was my first experience making movies and at the time I had no ideas how movies were done. I thought that's the way they're done so in a way I had nothing to compare it to.

When you go to the movies with your whole family it's a different experience. For some reason it's something that you're all doing together and you take away something special in that.

Sometimes when we weep in the movies we weep for ourselves or for a life unlived. Or we even go to the movies because we want to resist the emotion that's there in front of us. I think there is always a catharsis that I look for and that makes the movie experience worthwhile.

How do people relate to movies now when they're on portable devices or streaming them? It's not as much about going to the movies. That experience has changed.

Very often I've known people who wouldn't say a word to each other but they'd go to see movies together and experience life that way.

Normally I love to go to the movies and when I see a character portrayed by different actors at different ages it kind of pops a little bit for me. It brings me out of the movie experience. Now we have the technology to cure that.

There's only one thing that can kill the movies and that's education.

I love my early movies but naturalism is an artist's early style. Now I want to deal with feelings dreams an acceptance of irrationality.

I feel more influenced in my own work by dreams than I do by other writers' works in a way. Or by popular culture movies - what else is there to write about than love and loss?

If dreams are like movies then memories are films about ghosts.

I think violence cynicism brutality and fashion are the staples of our diet. I think in the grand history of story-telling going back to people sitting around fires the dark side of human nature has always been very important. Movies are part of that tradition.

Being non-commercial is never an ambition. Movies come together at different points for fortuitous reasons. You do them as you get the opportunity as opposed to doing them when you choose to or design to.

I was a cartoonist when I was at university but I decided to go into movie making knowing that I could still draw by doing movies design work story boards and such.

Hitchcock had to fight to the death to make his movies.

Movies like that aren't about the visual effects and explosions. They're human stories about family about life about death.

I miss my Dad. My Dad loved cheesy monster movies so we'd have Godzilla movie marathons. Those are some of my favorite memories laughing at how the monster outfits were so bad like black garbage bags for heads.

Whenever I did a good performance my Dad and my uncles who were rabid movie fans took me to the movies. There began my underlying love affair with film.

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.

My dad's sense of humor was direct and sometimes surreal - his quick wit is well known amongst our family and friends. He raised me on Spike Jones records and W.C. Fields movies and his sense of humor fell somewhere in between.

My Dad hated his job. He sold overcoats but he wanted to make movies. He had a failed career working with the Ritz Brothers - they were like the Marx Brothers only a tier below. I always had a picture in my mind of him in a straw hat.

I'm the most inappropriate dad. I curse in front of my kids and their friends. I let my kids watch R-rated movies. I'll walk by the movie theater and say 'Let's go see that ' and my kids will say 'No it's rated R. It's not appropriate for kids.' I'm like Uncle Dad. We have fun. I don't live with them but I drive over four days a week.

My mom was a professional. My dad and mom met each other in a movie called 'New Faces of 1937.' My mom went under the name Thelma Leeds and she did a few movies and she was really a great singer and when she married my dad and started to have a family she sang at parties.

I always wanted to be a stay-at-home dad making art making movies.