Jake Green isn't just Jake Green. Jake represents all of us. The colour green is the central column of the spectrum and the name Jake has all sorts of numerical values. All things come back to him within the film's world of cons and games.

After Lock, Stock, all these really nasty small town characters came knocking at my door trying to tell me stories, and somehow I ended up with this guy whose brother was feeding people to pigs, and that's what he did to get rid of people.

I don't tend to be a nitpicker when I'm watching movies, so as long as something is true to the spirit of the original, that's very much what we got for. You try to never do something that the original author wouldn't have done themselves.

I have to say: We were looking at all of Native American actors, who mostly all work under one casting director. And there's so much talent to be cast. There really is. We saw some really good readings. There's more talent to be had there.

Typically in horror films the character just services the plot, and you really are just going from 'point a' to 'point b,' just so that you can end up at 'point c.' They are just sort of stick characters. That's just not interesting to me.

I find Jessica Jones a much more interesting character to write for than Wonder Woman. Wonder Woman is so noble and heroic, and I don't find that as interesting as one who's really damaged and flawed and has post-traumatic stress disorder.

The naive thing I suppose is simply that we thought, in the words of Francis Fukuyama, that we had reached the end of history and we were entering a brave new world minus the Soviet Union where everything was going to be peaches and cream.

I have so many questions about love. How do you win at it? Especially if you're in a relationship with an impossible person? What if you believe in someone who's completely untrustworthy, who at their core can't even believe in themselves?

I could be just a writer very easily. I am not a writer. I am a screenwriter, which is half a filmmaker... But it is not an art form, because screenplays are not works of art. They are invitations to others to collaborate on a work of art.

I doubt if many of my contemporaries, especially the older ones, did many exercises. I have often tried to picture (Godfrey) Evans and (Denis) Compton doing press-ups in the out field before the days play, but so far have failed miserably.

How do you survive living in a cell knowing you are innocent? Many of those exonerated whom I have met seem to have a more benign, grateful attitude toward life than those of us who walk free. Many find a religious or spiritual stronghold.

The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices . . . . And the pity of it is that these things cannot be confined to the Twilight Zone.

I'm fortunate. I've always had medical care. I've always had access. I've never personally had to use a Planned Parenthood. But I have many friends who have and do and did, and I think it's important that that access be there for everyone.

Voting for Romney after the train wreck of that was the eight years of W. Bush is like losing your pay check playing a rigged game of three-card monte and then playing the same game again a week later 'cause the cards are a different color.

I'm interested in the relationships of people. I'm interested in the darker moments within us. All those aspects of human behavior, I'm fascinated by. But in the times we're in, those are hard movies to make. So if I can do it at HBO, fine.

Producers are men who will keep their heads in the noisy presence of writers and directors and not be carried away by art in any of its subversive guises. Their task is to guard against the unusual. They are the trusted loyalists of cliche.

When I'm writing, I'm trying to immerse myself in the chaos of an emotional experience, rather than separate myself from it and look back at it from a distance with clarity and tell it as a story. Because that's how life is lived, you know?

The enduring appeal of mystery stories for all of us is that the world is a pretty confusing place. There's a lot of really unanswered things, and perhaps the scariest notion would be that there might not always be answers out there for us.

I always wanted to see if I could sell a movie to the public without doing any marketing because my philosophy was like, 'Hey man, I'm reaching my audience everyday. I'm twittering with them. I'm in direct contact with them on the podcast.'

And that's what I liked about it, because they are, in the beginning, your little beautiful stock figures, who then make a decision to preserve their futures, but the decision they make isn't completely right, and it destroys their futures.

I like writing for other people. I love it. It's great because you write it and then you hand it off to someone else. But in terms of directing, anything I direct will be something I've written or re-written. I'm in no crazy rush to direct.

I was dyslexic as a child and it took me years to get passed that. I read a lot but it was hard and that didn't go away until my early-to-mid-twenties. So really what I was looking at were the photographs and the illustrations in magazines.

I'm ashamed to say this, but I watched every episode of 'Starsky and Hutch' as a kid. I loved that show, but now I think it's stupid - they'd have a car chase for no reason, then Paul Michael Glaser would shoot the car and it would blow up.

I don't get to watch a lot of TV, mainly because I'm busy working. And I pretty much try not to watch very much television at all, even American television, until I'm done with a season, because things start to creep into my head otherwise.

You work, especially in the movie business more than in TV, but you have an environment where people feel obliged to have an input because that's what they do, and I think sometimes it can clutter things up and make things more problematic.

It so happens that America, according to all the polls that are out there, is pretty progressive. So you're not going to see messages that support Ayn Randian individualism at the cost of the whole, because most people don't agree with that.

I don't advise a haircut, man. All hairdressers are in the employment of the government. Hairs are your aerials. They pick up signals from the cosmos, and transmit them directly into the brain. This is the reason bald-headed men are uptight.

One of the challenges with series TV is not to give everyone all the punchlines, all the gags and all the fun stuff at the top. Everyone is so anxious, for very good reasons, to hit the ground running, but I've been on the other end of that.

People ask me all the time, "What are your influences? Are you trying to do Beckett?" It's like, "No, I'm trying to do me." Whatever that is. I don't know what that is, but that's the basis. I'm trying to be true and I'm trying to be honest.

When I was a journalist, I didn't care how many people talked to Ice Cube before I talked Ice Cube. I just knew that when I talked to Ice Cube, it was going to be different than what anybody else had done, and it was the same with any group.

Even a very brief tape-delay introduces a form of censorship into the broadcast - not direct governmental control, but it means that a network representative is in effect guessing at what a government might tolerate, which can be even worse.

Turing was always a legend among computer/geeky kids. He was such an outsider in his own time, and because of that, he was able to see things differently. It was a story that had been well told in books, onstage and on TV, but never on film.

I had a daughter who was 9 years old and I had the feeling I wasn't going to be a real parent if I didn't quit making movies for a while and spend time with her. I also felt that I'd made enough movies and said what I had to say at the time.

The producers and I first talked about the Big Fish musical, right before we did the first test screening of the movie. I said, "I think there's a Broadway musical here." And really, from that day, we started figuring out how we would do it.

Every time an ashtray is missing from a hotel, they don't come looking for you. But let a diamond bracelet disappear in France and they shout John Robie, the Cat. You don't have to spend every day of your life proving your honesty, but I do.

I don't think I'm alarmist. I'm more disappointed by the euphemisms in some instances than outright bigotry. Now, to me, you walk around with a Klan hat on or you've got a swastika on you arm, you just look like a dope, you know what I mean?

An audience who watches my shows knows who I am, knows that right when they think I'm going to make a joke, I'm going to blow something up, or during the worst peril, I'm going to have someone give someone a kiss - it's just going to happen.

Sarah Michelle Gellar's made some really good choices. She's had some bad breaks. She goes with the independent, interesting young filmmakers and then they get slammed, like 'Southland Tales.' I'm proud of what she's trying to do. It's hard.

When I read [the script] and saw that it was my fanboy wet dream of an Avengers script and that [Agent] Coulson was a big part of it, that was the great day for me. I just drove around the streets with the script in the other seat, giggling.

I truly feel like my job is to make the shows. That's what I'm paid to do. It's somebody else's job to market them, and it's somebody else's job to pay attention to the ratings, because if I paid attention to all that, my head would explode.

I never had any connection with film or TV until I went into the business of supplying animals. It's an interesting business because you spend every day of your life on set watching other people directing and producing. It was an eye-opener.

Casting is great fun, except for the business of it. I love the casting process. I love the editing process. I love working with the music. And even prep is very exciting. But once you get there and the clock is ticking, all it is is stress.

It is true that the movie is perhaps my most politically-charged. The story is thrust into motion by the idea of what do you do when your 13 year old daughter comes home pregnant. And not only is she pregnant, but she wants to keep the baby.

I was way into 'Voltron,' Ray Harryhausen: anything with giant monsters, I was really into. Even dinosaurs - for a while, I wanted to be a paleontologist. So it's almost like primal, ancestral mythology to me, this fascination with monsters.

The rules are all in a sixty-four-page pamphlet by Aristotle called 'Poetics.' It was written almost three thousand years ago, but I promise you, if something is wrong with what you're writing, you've probably broken one of Aristotle's rules.

I've got plenty of quirks. I go to an office early in the morning. Early in the morning is really good writing time. I take anywhere between six to eight showers a day. I'm not exaggerating. I'm not a germaphobe: it's all about a fresh start.

That day I think we really saw each other for the first time. I mean, saw beyond the bag of bones on the outside. You take away her pretty and my plain and what you get underneath is about the same: a couple of lost girls looking to be found.

I will be dying and so will you, and so will everyone here. That's what I want to explore. We're all hurtling towards death, yet here we are for the moment, alive. Each of us knowing we're going to die, each of us secretly believing we won't.

I like keeping music in front of people. I try to sell at shows as much as I can - setting up a distro table and bringing out crates of vinyl and some CDs. That's my favorite way to sell because you're actually face-to-face with the customer.

Coming out of the '60s and the Vietnam War in America, it was commonplace for people to make films that had relevance to them. And since the '70s, cinema has gone almost entirely in the direction of spectacle and escapism and superhero films.

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