“I don’t believe in elitism. I don’t think the audience is this dumb person lower than me. I am the audience.”

My only obligation is to my characters. And they came from where I have been.

You don’t have to know how to make a movie. If you truly love cinema with all your heart and with enough passion, you can’t help but make a good movie.

I steal from every movie ever made.

My parents said, Oh, he’s going to be a director someday. I wanted to be an actor.

If I’m doing my job right, then I’m not writing the dialogue; the characters are saying the dialogue, and I’m just jotting it down.

If my answers frighten you then you should cease asking scary questions.

I don’t believe in putting in music as a band aid to get you over some rough parts or bad film making. If it’s there it’s got to add to it or take it to another level.

Particularly as a writer, it is my job to ignore social critics, or the response that social critics might have when it comes to the opinions of my characters, the way they talk, or anything that can happen to them.

If you just love movies enough, you can make a good one.

I have loved movies as the number one thing in my life so long that I can’t ever remember a time when I didn’t.

It’s nice to get invited to the parties and to be able to hobnob and celebrate a job well done with your colleagues.

In real life there are no bad guys. Everybody just has their own perspective.

My plan is to have a theatre in some small town or something and I’ll be manager. Ill be the crazy old movie guy.

As a writer, I demand the right to write any character in the world that I want to write. I demand the right to be them, I demand the right to think them and I demand the right to tell the truth as I see they are.

Violence is one of the most fun things to watch.

As a viewer, the minute I start getting confused, I check out of the movie. Emotionally, I’m severed.

A genius is a mentally ill person with an audience

If you want to make an audience laugh, you dress a man up like an old lady and push her down the stairs. If you want to make comedy writers laugh, you push an actual old lady down the stairs.

there are two ways of speaking an audience will always like: one is, to tell them what they don’t understand; and the other is, to tell them what they’re used to.

It was a revelation for me, in a practical sense, that you could write in an African language and still reach an audience beyond that language through the art of translation.

We have to stretch out the audience. It can’t be this narrow – we have to stretch out the point of view.

What audiences love with series is that they can invest in characters for such a long period of time, and it’s the same for actors. You can truly tell your story; then it’s done.

As an actor, it’s very interesting to make the audience love you while you are doing horrendous things.

The whole duty of a writer is to please and satisfy himself, and the true writer always plays to an audience of one.