As you get older, you want less from the world; you just want to experience it. Any barriers to feeling emotions get dismantled. And ordinary things become beautifully poetic.

We emphasize negativity and violence in the media because that's what grabs everybody's attention, but in the real world, it's mostly people being very cooperative and caring and connected and kind. That's the norm of human experience. And yet, what gets our attention is the very opposite.

It was always kind of sad when your favorite punk rockers, like Jello Biafra or someone, would say they hate something you like. It was, 'Oh, I thought we were on the same page.'

I was dating girls who were actresses, and that was fun, so I took a playwriting class. But that was short-lived. That was one year. Around that time, I was seeing movies that were making me think in terms of images.

I've always been most interested in the politics of everyday life: your relation to whatever you're doing, or what your ambitions are, where you live, where you find yourself in the social hierarchy.

It's luck that one thing works out and one doesn't, it's sort of happenstance.

I've always been interested in the industrialization of our food; it's been an issue for me from an environmental and animal rights and human health perspective.

The people you live with at college, those first roommates often are people you're still friends with the rest of your life.

No one believes this, but when I'm working, it's the same, whether I'm working on 'Bad News Bears,' 'Before Sunset,' 'A Scanner Darkly,' or 'Fast Food Nation.' I'm the same person, trying to make it work.