Yes, if I had it my way I would do all the shots myself - I used to do that when I was just a cameraman, an operator - but there's no way; you can't do that anymore.

I have never had trouble with any actor being able to visualise things. They are amazing. As long as you have your monster head on a long stick, so you can hold it up there and you can wave it around and let them see it and explain it to them, they are just great.

And I also trust that there's more than one way to do something.

Yes, if I had it my way I would do all the shots myself - I used to do that when I was just a cameraman, an operator - but there's no way; you can't do that anymore.

Just going along with this, what I did, or what I do is I imagine not being myself seeing it, but imagine somebody else who's seeing it for the first time.

I just focus on one show, when this is over then I'll start looking at what is coming up.

And it's very hard to do this stuff too because there are so many effects movies being done, so many companies busy doing this work and the public just wants to see it. Good work is being done all over the world.

I'm always reaching for something we really haven't done, and War of the Worlds has a lot of this sort of documentary look to it and first-person camera view that is a new thing for me. I've done some stuff like that before, but nothing like the extent of this and digitally.

What you want to do is, you want to get away from people being afraid to show their work, which is the first thing, because they don't want to be shot down.

Steven and I have worked together a lot and I'm far ahead of the curve than most people in knowing what he wants, but he knows far more than I know about what's important for the story. So, most of the changes he will make will involve story changes.

So much of it is the design of the shot or the motion of the character; it's the work you do so that it has the same things that are in the movie. In just a few frames it's got to communicate something clearly and dramatically.

I think you've got to talk to the director, see the director's films and recognise that it's important that the work fits right in and see if as part of the movie.

I see the tool set being the same and maybe doing virtual movies and that's fine for some stories but not for others. And maybe make all CG movies but they are already doing it.

But you don't hire Ang Lee to do a typical children's movie. But it's such an interesting combination, whoever thought of getting Ang together with a comic book, that was just great.

Because you're telling a story, and I'm sure people fifty years ago would tell the same story differently if they were telling it to you today. Because the time is different. The film is the work of today's audience.

It's harder for me to work on a Forrest Gump kind of movie, where everything is invisible.

Everyone is trying to do something that hasn't been done and that's a really good thing. You can only do so much with a story and some scripts don't give you the opportunities and other scripts do give you the opportunities to do things that haven't been done before.

You know a lot of what worked on this was taken from Harry Potter 2, the little Doby character, we had a lot of our skin stuff worked out and that helped a lot. We have a lot of exchange happening.

To me the biggest breakthrough was when we did Terminator 2 that just opened the door for Jurassic and all of the others and that was as big as when we did motion control on Star Wars. But I don't see another big thing coming.

And then you start getting into the technical side of it and the aesthetic side and with those areas you can come up with new ways to visualise things, new ways to render and use the computer to make things look different and new and stuff like that.

Other times you can get showy for three minutes, and that's OK with certain films. But that isn't right with an Ang Lee movie, you have to fit right in. You have to understand Ang, respect him and be part of the team and not be in charge of it - he is in charge of it.

I've done enough of this that I can tell early on if it's going in the wrong direction or not.

I took business classes as a back up but I made movies all the time. I would get my classes done in two days and then spend the rest of the time making my movies.

Aging has a wonderful beauty and we should have respect for that.

I feel it's a person's duty to participate in the governing of the country in which he lives.

My mom never went to college, but for her own children, getting a great education was not an option.

Because these consequences are distributed globally, the problem masquerades as a distraction. Because the length of time between causes and consequences stretches out longer than we're used to dealing with, it gives us the illusion that we have the luxury of time. Neither of those things is true.

The only way to go on holiday is with your expectations at ground level. Convince yourself before you go that the weather's going to be dreadful and there will be nylon sheets. You'll then be pleasantly surprised.

Discipline has been a key factor to my success.

When life hands you lemons, you make lemonade. But when life hands you hurricanes, you go surfing.

Strangely, I feel that I become increasingly reclusive in my normal life and more open and candid in my music.

I've done a little directing, but I love acting more.

My mom was on the United Way group that decides how to allocate the money and looks at all the different charities and makes the very hard decisions about where that pool of funds is going to go.

When somebody throws something out the car window, honk at them, but don't give them the finger. We've got to temper our negative feelings about people who desecrate the environment.

It's better to burn out than to fade away.

What I wanted to do in rock 'n roll was merge poetry with sonic scapes, and the two people who had contributed so much to that were Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison.

I wanted to be an actor from a young age, but actually becoming one and seen the ugly side of the world does feel different and sometimes unwelcome. There are shallow, vapid, untalented people zombieing the streets of Hollywood, adding decadence and immorality to an already extravagant business.

Tenured professors are more prone than the rest of us to think that the university is the universe.

I can watch anything from 1970s West Coast rock to 1990s electro-funk - I don't care.

There are things that should be allocated to states' rights - that's Gryffindor - and certain things allocated to the federal government, which is Slytherin.

If you put people in a corner, you see what their character really is.

I've seen a lot of people jump on and off my bandwagon.

There is no great writing, only great rewriting.

To marry unequally is to suffer equally.

Nothing happens by chance my friend... No such thing as luck.

Prior to 1940, the affluent and the middle class began to converge, but after 1979, the economic gap between the middle class and affluent widened significantly.

What was interesting was talking to older gay men about what it was like being gay in the Eighties.