I've always endeavored to make movies with my friends.

I like roller coasters that have the one 70-foot drop.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I take a great deal of value in things that are done by hand or executed by hand.

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.

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 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.

I love film criticism as an art. I think it's a very important thing.

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 always making movies for my audiences, but I'm not trying to meet their expectations.

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.

Especially in the Western world, so much of our cultural ideas about grieving is about us, and I think it's important to get beyond that sometimes.

I have a very short attention span, which is funny. I mean, you'd watch me and think that I don't, but I actually do.

I find everything in life a little bit sad, but I also find a great deal of hope everywhere I look.

I never put a premium on making a living. It was never one of those things that was important to me.

I like being able to go to the cinema and sit and spend time observing something without thinking about plot or what one character is saying. I feel like I'm able to connect on a much more profound level.

With 'Pete's Dragon,' Disney was very excited about the movie I wanted to make; they were very supportive of it, and it was a smooth process. I was really surprised by that.

If your financiers care about the movie, they will be involved in a very constructive fashion, but it can get out of hand very quickly, and that is something to be aware of in any type of filmmaking.

'Peter Pan' is a beloved property. It's a property that was brought to the screen many, many times before, so one has to not only justify the reasons why one might make a 'Peter Pan' movie in 2018, 2019 or whatever, but you also have to do justice to the source material.

I don't think I'm the best screenwriter in the world. It's just important to me to write my movies so I'm personally invested in them.

In my darkest moments, I have not eaten an entire pie, but I have turned to other baked goods to find solace.

I certainly did not envisage making a Disney movie. The most I hoped for was to be able to pay my bills. I was not a go-getter. I was very type-B.

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.

One of my biggest regrets is that I didn't finish college.

I love animals and their behavior. I watch cat videos all the time.

The films I love are very precise, and every shot means something; every shot should convey something new.

I love films that are more random and chaotic, finding moments and capturing them.

I learned to not separate writing, shooting, and editing, it's all sort of one big mess of creative output.

'Ain't Them Bodies Saints' wound up becoming a love story even though it was not initially meant to be one.

It's something that you pick up at a history class in college, the idea that history and time is something to which we can't even hold a candle to. We, as human beings, are just a small element in the overarching sweep of narrative history. That really had a profound effect on me, that realization.

I want to live a very positive and optimistic life that has a wonderful outlook on the future and the impact that I will have on the world and the people around me.

I make movies to be watched the way I want to watch them, and I want to watch them in movie theatres.

The image of a bedsheet ghost standing all alone in an empty house was something I was obsessed with. I really wanted to make a film about that image, and I was waiting for the right story to come along. When it did, I did my best to honor that image.

A great sense of morality was instilled in me through my upbringing in the Catholic faith - particularly because my father is a moral theologian. And morality is something I believe exists separate from faith, as an intrinsic human quality that one should aspire to understand and participate in.

I try to live my life with grace and through grace even though I don't particularly believe in the divine - and that's a direct result of my having been raised Catholic.

There is a palpable sense of history in the homes that I choose to occupy. I think that's one of the reasons I gravitate towards old homes: I really like that sense of history and that sense that I am one step in a very long process that trails out in both directions around me - before me and ahead of me.

I like to make movies in Texas because that's where I learned how to do it. I know the industry there, I know the people, I know the crews. But it's hard to make films in Texas.