Much of directing [a movie] is not directing but just listening and being present in the moment and just keeping your eyes open..

All my favorite movies are somebody else's least favorite movie..

If I spend a year and a half writing a script, the first year will be outlining in notebooks. It's just the way I work, definitely not necessarily th….

There's something about the sci-fi genre that gets an audience interested in it, so maybe you can take some risks that you couldn't, if you were just….

I really spend as long as I can sketching everything out and working on the structure before I sit down to type out scenes..

When I see a news story on a site, about a movie that I'm interested in, it's like the mouse going for the pleasure button and I click it. But then, ….

I just don't think CGI is up to manipulating the human face yet. I feel like you can get away with it with aliens or monsters or something that's int….

I do think that I'm a big believer in having an idea or having ideas and just tucking them away in the back of your brain. Even if you aren't conscio….

Rather than thinking in terms of a specific genre or specific kind of thing, I hope I can just stay relatively small and keep making my movies. If I ….

The only advice I can really give to the young filmmakers is to be persistent, don't give up, and keep watching and making as many movies as you poss….

You come out of each movie just thinking, "God, if we can fool them into letting us make just one more, we can get it right.".

Writing in a lot of ways feels more like excavation than construction. It feels like you're uncovering this thing bit by bit, discovering what it is,….

Teen movies often have an unspoken underlying premise in which high school is seen as less serious than the adult world. But when your head is encase….

I feel like people want to be surprised when they get out of the movies. They want something thrown at them they didn't expect. They want stuff that ….

You go from these high hopes when you're writing to just a desperate want of not making a complete fool of yourself by the end of it..

That's part of the appeal of time-travel movies: The notion of going back and fixing something..

If you make something interesting, inevitably not everybody is going to like it..

I'm a sci-fi fan, and I guess you have to let go of some of that at some point, and realize that as long as you're focused on telling a story that yo….

You never want to make a "message movie," but you always want to be talking about something that you care about..

It's best if I stay out of future plans and let time go on..

The fanboy community can smell in an instant, like smelling fear, when something was tailor-made in order to reach them as a demographic..