I would say that 'Schindler's List,' as powerful as it was, seemed to have continued with a particular iconography of victimization and passivity. That was the iconography with which I had grown up and to which I had grown accustomed.

'Milk' doesn't imply that all gay men who stayed in the closet were cowards.

There is nothing that is so serious that you can't also see its comic side. Comedy is a way of talking about the most serious things.

It's a harder time to make original, less conventional movies. But God, we need them!

Doctors are kind of this shibboleth in our society. We know what they do, and we depend on them, but we don't know a lot about what it feels like from their side.

As we began to read more and more journals of men who had been in the Civil War and then been in the Indian Wars, we realized there was a whole universe of men whose souls had been shattered, whose lives had been utterly destroyed by what they had to do.

I think most Americans probably believe that our relationship with Japan began in 1941. In fact, obviously, it began in 1854 when Commodore Perry sailed into Yokohama harbor and threatened to burn it down unless they would open up to trade with us. The imperial impulse was first ours historically.

In my office, we were talking about the fact that they'd announced a remake of 'A Star is Born,' and I was bemoaning the idea of a fourth remake. And the young guys who work in my office were giving me blank looks, like, 'What's 'A Star is Born?'

You can spend an extraordinary amount of time raising independent money to do a movie for very little means. I've done it with 'Pawn Sacrifice.'

Ironically, it's easier to raise the money to make the film than it is to have the film find wide distribution.

There have been bombings by extremists. They are not representatives of Islam. They're not representative of the vast majority of people who love this country, but nonetheless, they exist.

The ronin were those masterless men who roamed around, and yet they found themselves getting involved in circumstances they hadn't expected.

I'm very promiscuous in my tastes.

When you're in a fight, and you get hit, it hurts. And as you get older, you begin to take on the aches and the bruises of doing that.

The most interesting thing to me in chess are not the gambits. Or the moves. It's the mental toughness.

You have to make choices always. It's about the omission of something for the sake of another.

The Beatles in 1963 came to America and became international celebrities, but Bobby Fischer was one of the first, as Elvis was, more in terms of the message created around him.

Scale is not just something that a director wants so as to play with all the toys. Scale also lends verisimilitude, to put together a real world.

If I try to think objectively about myself and my work, I would say I want to be intuitive and distinctive.

You can't help but reveal your bias, and you can't but invest personally in any story that you tell.

I like to reveal people with some of the niceties of social behavior stripped away and the moral, ethical, and political issues are revealed.

Stories are one of the means by which a culture preserves its identity.

The phone that you carry around with you. It's not just that it's a locator for anybody who wants to actually find out where you are, but it's also a leash. It's a reminder just how tethered you are.

I think there is a very powerful wish that we all have of being self-contained and having sort of opted out or choosing to remove ourselves from society and to have no ties and no obligations, and even no possessions. To be free in a particular way.

I think every culture - you can call it an American Ronin, a medieval knight errant, you could talk about 'Shane.' There is an archetype that I think is actually common to a lot of cultures, and even the Clint Eastwood stuff was probably as influenced by the Japanese stuff, and yet done by an Italian.

The Mitch Rapp novels are as thrilling and entertaining as they are relevant. I am delighted to be given the opportunity to translate them to the screen.

Often, romantic comedies exist in a vacuum, and it's kind of odd.

There's a great tradition of actors taking on parts of much less obvious sympathy.

People tend not to dwell on drama.

The promise of an action movie to a certain audience is not a bad thing.

One resists categorization at one's peril.

Romantic comedy has come to mean a couple of moderately talented actors placed in implausible situations obliged to go through a set of paces that are all too familiar, the end result being neither romantic nor comedic.

A sex scene is gratuitous when it only exists for its own sake.

There's only a certain number of movies I'm going to get made, and it's important to me that they each be original somehow.

I really look forward to that opportunity to be a student and discover things. That keeps it interesting for me. And I sometimes get easily bored, and there are still some things I wanna talk about instead of repeating something.

People make the assumption that you're only interested in one thing based on the most recent thing you've done. But some directors can be pretty promiscuous about their tastes, and that's how I want to challenge myself.

Candor is the key to collaborating effectively. Lack of candor leads to dysfunctional environments.

A hallmark of a healthy creative culture is that its people feel free to share ideas, opinions, and criticisms. Our decision-making is better when we draw on the collective knowledge and unvarnished opinions of the group.

Every Pixar movie has its own rules that viewers have to accept, understand, and enjoy understanding. The voices of the toys in the 'Toy Story' films, for example, are never audible to humans.

We have to evolve, we have to change, and in order to do that, we have to initiate the change.

The skill of a good creative leader is being comfortable with blowing up an idea and knowing it will get better.

When it comes to producing breakthroughs, both technological and artistic, Pixar's track record is unique. In the early 1990s, we were known as the leading technological pioneer in the field of computer animation.

Creativity has to start somewhere, and we are true believers in the power of bracing, candid feedback, and the iterative process - reworking, reworking, and reworking again until a flawed story finds its through line or a hollow character finds its soul.

Encourage people to mingle, meet, and communicate.

It is not the manager's job to prevent risks. It is the manager's job to make it safe to take them.

I don't think most of our films should be realistic, but you want that as an artistic possibility. Then, the artist can take the realism of the world and push it in ways that we can connect with.

We encourage our people to build their ideas from scratch, and we give them the resources - and, crucially, the candid feedback - that are required to transform the first wisps of a story into a truly compelling film.

Outsourcing, in and of itself, isn't responsible for the erosion of America's high tech infrastructure. The short-term thinking that led to a lot of bad outsourcing decisions is the root cause. And short-term thinking isn't a problem confined to the executive suite. It's a problem in Washington and in our society as a whole.

One reason for keeping Disney animation separate from Pixar was that by solving their own problems when they finished a film, Disney could say, 'Nobody bailed us out; we did it.' And it's a very important social thing for them to do that.

The trick is, in everything we do, there are things we love. And sometimes the things we love get us stuck. And it's only if we let go of some of those things that we free the movie up to become greater.