“My family moved - first to Washington, D.C., and then, in the spring of 1975, to Lebanon, where my father worked as a diplomat at the American embassy. My parents were enthusiastic about the move, so my older brother and I felt like we were off to some place kind of cool.”
“My grandfather had two boys, my uncle had three boys, my dad had me and my two brothers, each of my brothers have had two boys. Then something happened with the chromosomal experiment and suddenly I've got three girls.”
“If you're working on a movie, you want it to be projected on the largest tapestry possible, and the sound to be perfect, and for that kind of communal experience of the movies to take place for it.”
“I find fear is a great motivator to work hard.”
“Let's keep the chemists over here and the food over here, that's my feeling. What do I know? But that is a big aspect of fast food is their ability to artificially taint the colors and the smells and stuff to stimulate appetite.”
“I can't not find humor in elements of most parts of life, but at the same time nothing ever seems perpetually funny to me.”
“'Little Miss Sunshine' snowballed. It was a tiny movie. We shot it in 30 days, and it was really fun to do, but it was one of those small movies that you don't hold out huge hope for.”
“The irony is that you can't use real rain to make movies.”
“Here's the thing about movies, all movies end up on television. That's their life. Whether you like it or not, I don't care how much money you spend on it, or how big or broad the film is, or who the actors are in it, eventually it's all coming out of the box.”
“Audiences don't ever disappoint me, in the sense that movies I feel really good about, they usually feel really good about too.”
“There's something in human nature, the trying-to-get-on-with-it quality of people, the struggle to maintain or keep the show going can be exhausting.”
“When I look back on my childhood, I think of that short time in Beirut. I know that seeing the city collapse around me forced me to grasp something many people miss: the fragility of peace.”
“Part of filmmaking is always a guessing game, and part of it is always a game of trust.”