I want to make movies that pierce people's hearts and touch them in some way even if it's just for the night while they're in the cinema in that moment I want to bring actual tears to their eyes and goosebumps to their skin.

I haven't deliberately set out to play the blonde bombshell in my movies. In fact it's probably been quite the opposite. After the success of The Mask I wasn't offered all that many blonde bombshell parts to be honest. I think people believed from the beginning that I could actually walk and talk at the same time.

I care about the connection with the audience. Film is such a powerful medium. Movies can change the way people think.

I don't stop. It's my nature. People have to tell me to slow down. I plan on playing every role on Broadway. I want to do 'Evita.' I want to do 'Sweeney Todd' with Chris Colfer. We want to do 'Wicked.' I'll be Elphaba and he wants to play 'Guy-linda.' I want to do movies make music. 'Glee' is only the beginning.

Critics can be harsh and I think it's going to take me a long time to make people see what I have inside of me and that I really put my guts into movies and that I'm not superficial and that I'm not just a pretty face.

People say you never remember anybody who dies in movies and it's true you don't. You don't even remember people who disappear.

When people ask me what makes movies great it's the material.

Well Toronto I consider to be the birthplace of my films. I've made three films and this is the third one to premiere here in the same theater on the same day at the same time - they are my audience. They're the people that I think about while I'm writing directing and editing. I specifically make movies for them.

I think romance is a tool comedy is a tool and drama is a tool. I really just want to tell stories that challenge the viewer move people make you laugh perhaps push an idea about being open-minded but never settle on a genre or an opinion. I hate genre. I like movies that are original in their approach.

I hate movies that tell people what to think. I'm proud that Democrats thought 'Thank You For Smoking' was their film and Republicans thought it was theirs. I'm proud that pro-choice people thought 'Juno' was their film and pro-life people thought it was theirs.

There certainly is no secret in that there are plenty of people who don't like plenty of my movies. Each one of my films is personal each one of my films is emotionally autobiographical. And I like directors who do that. With each one of my films I'm exploring one of my own issues and I try to expose myself a little in the film.

The best movies have one sentence that they're exploring a thesis something that people can argue about over dinner afterward.

There are movies where we are interested in seeing people's lives without agreeing with what they're doing.

I always leave that for other people to decide because some of the things I consider to be disasters are some people's favorite movies. And that's what I like so much is that you never know. Something intrigues somebody and means nothing to somebody else.

There are movies that require fantasy and slightly more fantastical acting. Lines that are good for certain movies in real life circumstances would be absolutely unbelievable things to really say and you would look at these people like they're freaks for conversing that way. But somehow for certain styles of movies it works and it seems fine.

It was like in Samoa when they'd put up a movie screen on the beach and show movies and the locals would run behind the sheet to see where the people went. It was pretty grim.

I think it's more interesting to see people who don't feel appropriately. I relate to that because sometimes I don't feel anything at all for things I'm supposed to and other times I feel too much. It's not always like it is in the movies.

I think these movies are as much for people of that time as for people who weren't born. For people who weren't born they see how leaders must act under a crisis situation not trying to be re-elected or not trying to check polls that they go from their gut check.

People talk about mumblecore but I prefer bumblecore hyper-realistic bee movies about how bees really are.

Some people think literature is high culture and that it should only have a small readership. I don't think so... I have to compete with popular culture including TV magazines movies and video games.

You're creating new things in movies and people are going to steal them.

You go back to those films of the '40s and '50s and hear the dialogue the way the people played off each other - the wordplay. I think we've really lost that in movies.

I think being self-referential is really narcissistic. Who's to say anybody's even thinking of you that much? But some of these movies that I've done people still recite lines to me even 20 years later.

It seems to me that one thing people do over and over again is try to figure out how to get married stay married fall in love how to rekindle all this stuff. It seems to me to be a pretty eternal theme so I don't know if you can get typecast from making movies about men relating to women. It seems to be what is going on on the planet a lot.