In dialogue scenes, my favorite moments are when people aren't talking because you can cut to the heart of the matter much more quickly, often with a look. People hide things in words. When you don't have words to hide things in, it becomes much more direct and much more immediate of a connection.

One of my earliest memories, movie-related or otherwise, is of seeing a man dunking a man's head in a toilet on television, and my mom telling me that this is what would happen to me if I ever joined the Army. It wasn't until my senior year in high school that I would discover that this was a scene from 'The Great Santini,' starring Robert Duvall.

I love working with the same people. When I find someone I love and that I like working with, I don't want to stop working with them.

Obviously 'Pete's Dragon' is more commercial than 'A Ghost Story,' but when making them, I'm just trying to tell a story that matters to me, that ultimately would satisfy me as a moviegoer. Because watching movies is my favorite thing to do. I watch a lot of them.

With the transcendent or supernatural, they help us contextualize our own lives while we are here on this earth. On a narrative level, as a storyteller, they are a wonderful tool and technique by which to explore those hopes, those fears, those existential dilemmas that we all face from time to time.

I love horror films. I love ghost movies and haunted-house movies.

I realized that filmmaking is an eminently scalable act. No matter how big or how small, there's joys and stresses that will all scale themselves magnificently to fit the production.

I'm an atheist. I don't believe in the afterlife, but I do believe in ghosts.

I'm a deeply romantic person, nostalgic to a fault.

I love dialogue, but I'm also terrified of it. In all my movies, I've done my best to cut out as much dialogue as possible. I love the spaces in those silences. Even in 'Pete's Dragon,' I was so happy that the first twenty minutes have about five or six lines of dialogue.

I have a repository of titles I like in my head, and I am always looking for a movie that I can put one on.

Some filmmakers are great at making complex things and films with a lot of moving parts, and I'm just not that way.

The only part of 'A Ghost Story' that was reactionary was a temporal one. I had spent so much time making 'Pete's Dragon' that I was really impatient and excited to make something new. When this project presented itself, I was ready to jump right into it. I started shooting two days after 'Pete's Dragon.'

I can't watch my movies at their premieres - I learned that lesson the hard way.

I made 'St. Nick' on a 30-page outline. 'Aint' Them Bodies Saints' was a full-bodied script, but it still had a lot of room for improvisation. There were scenes that weren't there on the page - just a sentence saying something happens. I was like, 'We'll figure this out when we shoot it.'

I don't like being pessimistic. I don't like living my life with a nihilistic mindset.

I have so many aspirations and interests that would not fit within the Disney brand. I need to make sure I'm engaging those proclivities as well.

I often conflate the domestic and the cosmic on a daily basis.

I guess you can't really turn a camera on outside in Texas without getting Terrence Malick comparisons.

I love communicating non-verbally. I find great value in it.

When you cut from a long shot to a close shot, you're doing it for a reason, or if you let something stay in long shot for a long take. On the short films, I was teaching myself how to express something personal cinematically, how to use the language of film the best I could.

The very first film I ever made, when I was seven years old, when I got my hands on a camcorder, was a remake of 'Poltergeist,' which I hadn't seen yet because my parents wouldn't allow me to. But I made my own version of it, and it starred my brother in a bed sheet.

The idea that all we have is everything that's come before us, and we are the accumulated weight of our own personal histories, is a beautiful concept. And yet it also leaves you asking, 'Is that all there is? Is that all that defines us? Is that all we have?'

There are some stories - not even stories, some feelings - that you can't accomplish in cinema without using celluloid.

I'm happy to keep making Disney movies.

The first movie I ever saw in the cinema was Walt Disney's 'Pinocchio,' upon its 1984 re-release, which would have put me at three years old.

Grief reveals itself in the most mundane activities, like eating. It's never when you're looking at old pictures.

I never rejected religion, but it just ceased to be an overriding concern in my life.

I know I have trouble watching my own films.

Dramas are incredibly compelling. I feel like 'Silver Linings Playbook' is a drama, but because it's funny, people market it as a comedy.

I love movies. I can't participate in my love of movie-making fully unless I'm producing it.

I think there is a value in leaving the world a little better off, and movies can do that in a minor way.

I love what Paul Thomas Anderson did with 'The Master' with putting out those teasers made up of footage that's not in the movie.

Digital is my safety net. I know how to use it, how to operate those cameras; it makes sense to me. Film is much more mysterious.

You always want your movies to reach the widest audience possible.

Hindsight is the most dangerous thing imaginable for me. I imagine that's the case for most filmmakers. And I would love to be a filmmaker who was an exception to that rule, but I'm certainly not.

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.