"I don't know how much movies should entertain. To me, I'm always interested in movies that scar. The thing I love about Jaws is the fact that I've never gone swimming in the ocean again." "I don't want to tell you how to do your job, but somebody has to." "I have demons you can't even imagine." "Directing ain't about drawing a neat little picture and showing it to the cameraman. I didn't want to go to film school. I didn't know what the point was. The fact is, you don't know what directing is until the sun is setting and you've got to get five shots and you're only going to get two." "People will say, 'There are a million ways to shoot a scene,' but I don't think so. I think there're two, maybe. And the other one is wrong." "As a director, film is about how you dole out the information so that the audience stays with you when they're supposed to stay with you, behind you when they're supposed to stay behind you, and ahead of you when they're supposed to stay ahead of you." "Belligerence certainly helps. And there's a requisite paranoia. There's fear--fear of failure--and an overwhelming urge to be liked." - [about the personality traits that helps in being a director] I went to a place called the Berkley Film Institute for a summer program with a grade school friend of mine, and we just thought it was a joke. It was very impressionist, very Berkley. There were all these people who were there to communicate and change the world, to do all these lofty things -- and then they made these really shitty, stupid little movies. And we were kind of like, "I'm not here for this, I'm just here to pull cable." We were the youngest people there and we ended up being the grips and electrics on everybody else's movies, and it was pretty good those six or seven weeks, we got to shoot Panaflex cameras and make a married print - it was in black and white and you made these little cheese-ball movies, but at least you were making "something." It was kind of like film school in that way, but those who can't do, teach, and those who couldn't teach, taught there. They tried, they just didn't want to get dirty with it, they didn't want to get in up to their necks. It was all very patrician." I'm totally anti-commercialism. I would never do commercials where people hold the product by their head and tell you how great it is, I just wouldn't do that stuff. It's all inference ... The Levis commercials I did weren't really about jeans, the Nike commercials weren't about shoes. The 'Instant Karma' spot was some of the better stuff I got offered, and it was never about people going, "Buy this shoe, this shoe will change everything," because I think that's nonsense. Anybody looking outside themselves to make themselves whole is delusional and probably sick.