And Hackman had really choked up when he was telling it. It was very moving.

I'd never heard anything about this at all.

And Hackman had really choked up when he was telling it. It was very moving.

One of the things I enjoyed the most is just working as an actor.

The subject of an outsider who becomes obsessed.

Any romantic feelings for a 12-year-old are like entering into a fantasy world.

Anytime I make a movie, I really have absolutely no idea how it's going to go over. I've had the whole range of different kinds of reactions.

Every time you do a take on a movie, you're not sure if it's going to succeed. Even if you have a great cast, like we had, every scene you're kind of waiting for the release. 'Oh, yes; it happened. We got it!' There's always the possibility that it's just not going to work.

I don't know what is in store for the movie business any better than anybody else does, but it does seem like my kind of movies are a little trickier than it used to be - or maybe a lot trickier.

I guess when I think about it, one of the things I like to dramatise, and what is sometimes funny, is someone coming unglued. I don't consider myself someone who is making the argument that I support these choices. I just think it can be funny.

I have a way of filming things and staging them and designing sets. There were times when I thought I should change my approach, but in fact, this is what I like to do. It's sort of like my handwriting as a movie director. And somewhere along the way, I think I've made the decision: I'm going to write in my own handwriting.

I have always wanted to work in the theater. I've always felt the glamour of being backstage and that excitement, but I've never actually done it - not since I was in 5th grade, really. But I've had many plays in my films. I feel like maybe theater is a part of my movie work.

I love working with actors. That's what the set really is, for me. It's my time with the actors.

I usually set aside a lot of time in advance of a movie with important roles for kids to search, but when you have great ones, they can be a real ace in the hole.

I will say that Edward Norton, who plays the scout master, would be a first-rate Eagle Scout. He's got all those techniques. If your plane crashes into the jungle somewhere, he would be the guy you would want to have with you.

I wouldn't say that I'm particularly bothered or obsessed with detail.

I've never had a movie that got great reviews. I've had movies that got different levels of good and bad reviews, but you can more or less count on plenty of bad reviews.

Kids are always open to anything. It's very rare that a kid isn't extremely eager to make you happy.

My experience with casting children is that... the whole movie is going to rest on their shoulders, so you have to set aside time and wait for the perfect people to appear.

On Fantastic Mr. Fox, I got used to working with animated storyboards as a way of planning for the shoot. We did a lot of sequences that way with this movie. Partly as a result of that, I decided to build more sets in order to do certain shots.

Paris is a place where, for me, just walking down a street that I've never been down before is like going to a movie or something. Just wandering the city is entertainment.

Sometimes when you're editing a movie, you have the thing that you don't expect - which is you make it longer and longer as you go along.

That's the kind of movie that I like to make, where there is an invented reality and the audience is going to go someplace where hopefully they've never been before. The details, that's what the world is made of.

There's no story if there isn't some conflict. The memorable things are usually not how pulled together everybody is. I think everybody feels lonely and trapped sometimes. I would think it's more or less the norm.

Usually when I'm making a movie, what I have in mind first, for the visuals, is how we can stage the scenes to bring them more to life in the most interesting way, and then how we can make a world for the story that the audience hasn't quite been in before.

When I see the first dailies on any movie, I usually feel that I had no idea how this combination of ingredients was going to mix together, what it was going to produce.

When you're 11 or 12 years old, you can get so swept up in a book that you start to believe that the fantasy is reality. I think when you have a giant crush when you're in fifth grade, it becomes your whole world. It's like being underwater; everything is different.

You cannot just keep borrowing more and more and keep spending more and more without eventually having a day of reckoning.

America is a nation that conceives many odd inventions for getting somewhere but it can think of nothing to do once it gets there.

It took years, honestly, to deal with the disappointment of Beijing.

I love my genre films, but I think when I get older, the way I tell it will be very different to how I told it when I was in my mid-twenties, which is how old I was when I made the first 'Saw.'

Swedish taxes are high, and we don't get as much as we used to for them. And our schools aren't so good.

That fat speed that I love, that sensation, that's what I want.

It was being a runner that mattered, not how fast or how far I could run. The joy was in the act of running and in the journey, not in the destination. We have a better chance of seeing where we are when we stop trying to get somewhere else.

The proximate cause of Iraq's unraveling was the increasing authoritarian, sectarian, and corrupt conduct of the Iraqi government and its leader after the departure of the last U.S. combat forces in 2011.

The biggest challenge is to stay focused. It's to have the discipline when there are so many competing things.

The toddler craves independence, but he fears desertion.

Supermarket companies are big logistics companies, and one of the ways we've increased profitability in the past is by re-evaluating how they do logistics.

Al Qaeda has significance beyond its numbers, frankly. And so for us, our 24-hour-a-day objective is to seek out those al Qaeda cells. And, as we seek them out, to target them and eliminate them. And we're doing that 24 hours a day.

I was playing rugby and the other games English school children do, and there was an event in which races were run, and I won these by a considerable margin.

The gay thing has always been hard for me.

Decentralisation is controversial - but that's fine. We should be fearless about having a debate.

We will liberate our country from the occupying forces and put an end to relations between Russia and the Chechen State, no matter how difficult the task may be.

I do like silver. I love antiques. I collect Georgian glass at home. When you think about how fragile that it is and think about how long these things have lasted - some of it is 400 years old - I find the history of these things extraordinary.

Every day I play golf, that's my goal. To break 70 the other way. To shoot 70 or better.

Things aren't interesting if you level them. It's the voice that's interesting.

Going back in time, the best sportsmen ever have been Olympians.

Hunger and homelessness aren't things we always want to talk about.

The courts recent decisions have made life more difficult for the democratic institutions that perform the day to day work of our nation.