The subject of an outsider who becomes obsessed.

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.

At university - when I was supposed to be studying biochemistry - I had tried to write a children's book about a boy and a wolf cub, and there was a paragraph in that which was from the wolf's point of view.

The choices for me now are completely creative. I know, when I'm going to make a record, it ain't going to sell.

I would never do crack... I would never do a drug named after a part of my own ass, okay?

There's only one thing that everyone in this world has in common: whether you want to love somebody and you want to be loved in return.

Persia is 7,000 years old and will fight to survive.

I only know one way to pitch. I really do.

I'm actually pretty afraid of scary movies, so I can't watch them at night, but I am a fan during the daytime!

Man is a physical and spiritual epitome of the Universe.

I'd rather be able to face myself in the bathroom mirror than be rich and famous.

So I think that is one of the reasons we can face some regional problems, which are very difficult, very dramatic and is necessary to have instruments to solve these problems. NATO is such instrument.

I hope the Guggenheim plan will be revived.

The Obama administration, seemingly without any concern or worry, funneled money around U.S. law through foreign central banks to provide a state sponsor of terrorism with $400 million in blood money for American hostages.

We don't know why, but pancreatic cancer has a very interesting physiological link to depression. There seems to be a deep link, and we don't know what it is.

Sofia Coppola is wonderful, and I'd love to work with her.

Directors are never in short supply of girlfriends.

You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope.

I will continue to practice a martial arts form along with the mental and spiritual aspect that come with building a balanced life, and I will continue to incorporate it into whatever films I can.

The prayer of the agnostic: "O God, if there is a God, save my soul if I have a soul."

I love the Cannes Film Festival. From the lavish parties and events to the red carpet attire, this star-studded week-long event is where I get a lot of inspiration for hair and fashion.

I see the world as a magical place. Therefore, it was only natural that magic wafted from my fiction like smoke.

Hate sells.

When I was thirteen years old, I didn't exactly discover epic fantasy on my own. I acquired it as a social defence mechanism.