I make movies to be watched the way I want to watch them, and I want to watch them in movie theatres.

I made 'St. Nick' on a 30-page outline. 'Aint' Them Bodies Saints' was a full-bodied script, but it still had a lot of room for improvisation. There were scenes that weren't there on the page - just a sentence saying something happens. I was like, 'We'll figure this out when we shoot it.'

Time goes by so slowly when you're a child, and then, as an adult, it goes by in the blink of an eye.

If your financiers care about the movie, they will be involved in a very constructive fashion, but it can get out of hand very quickly, and that is something to be aware of in any type of filmmaking.

I love animals and their behavior. I watch cat videos all the time.

The idea that all we have is everything that's come before us, and we are the accumulated weight of our own personal histories, is a beautiful concept. And yet it also leaves you asking, 'Is that all there is? Is that all that defines us? Is that all we have?'

I love movies. I can't participate in my love of movie-making fully unless I'm producing it.

So many of my films involve houses or homes that have been abandoned. People trying to get back home. That's an idea that I keep dealing with.

I love 'Peter Pan' to death. It's one of the most influential pieces of storytelling in my life. It made a huge impact on how I grew up. I love the cartoon. I love the 2003 version.

The very first film I ever made, when I was seven years old, when I got my hands on a camcorder, was a remake of 'Poltergeist,' which I hadn't seen yet because my parents wouldn't allow me to. But I made my own version of it, and it starred my brother in a bed sheet.

I'm an atheist. I don't believe in the afterlife, but I do believe in ghosts.

I have always thought of myself as a writer, only because I need things to direct, and I can't not write the things that I direct.

I have so many aspirations and interests that would not fit within the Disney brand. I need to make sure I'm engaging those proclivities as well.

I love taking something that is understood to be funny or charming or sweet or naive and instilling it with some degree of gravity.

I never put a premium on making a living. It was never one of those things that was important to me.

Obviously 'Pete's Dragon' is more commercial than 'A Ghost Story,' but when making them, I'm just trying to tell a story that matters to me, that ultimately would satisfy me as a moviegoer. Because watching movies is my favorite thing to do. I watch a lot of them.

I'm not searching for the meaning of life, but I'm looking for a meaning within my life.

I want to live a very positive and optimistic life that has a wonderful outlook on the future and the impact that I will have on the world and the people around me.

The first movie I ever saw in the cinema was Walt Disney's 'Pinocchio,' upon its 1984 re-release, which would have put me at three years old.

Some filmmakers are great at making complex things and films with a lot of moving parts, and I'm just not that way.

Hindsight is the most dangerous thing imaginable for me. I imagine that's the case for most filmmakers. And I would love to be a filmmaker who was an exception to that rule, but I'm certainly not.

I love working with the same people. When I find someone I love and that I like working with, I don't want to stop working with them.

One of my favorite rules of writing: stop whenever it's feeling really good so you have something to look forward to the next day.

I think, with 'St. Nick,' when you're working with a smaller budget, you have fewer risks involved. You're able to take chances with style and content.

I'm sentimental to a fault.

I love horror films. I love ghost movies and haunted-house movies.

I love the Spanish language.

I can't solve a puzzle for the life of me - my brain doesn't work that way. But I can take a very simple idea and extrapolate from it and spend time with it and pull things out of it.

I have a repository of titles I like in my head, and I am always looking for a movie that I can put one on.

I've never had an actual haunting experience, in the way you might anticipate a ghost in a movie haunting someone, but I do feel presences around me all the time, and I do feel that memories haunt us the way ghosts haunt us or might haunt characters in a film.

I guess you can't really turn a camera on outside in Texas without getting Terrence Malick comparisons.

The films I love are very precise, and every shot means something; every shot should convey something new.

I have a very short attention span, which is funny. I mean, you'd watch me and think that I don't, but I actually do.

When you have a lot going on in a scene - whether it be a lot of shots, a lot of coverage, a lot of edits, or just the amount of content - it can cover up a deficit of true feeling. But when you don't have a lot of material to work with, you really have to be sincere with everything. You really have to mean it, because there's nowhere to hide.

Especially in the Western world, so much of our cultural ideas about grieving is about us, and I think it's important to get beyond that sometimes.

With 'Pete's Dragon,' Disney was very excited about the movie I wanted to make; they were very supportive of it, and it was a smooth process. I was really surprised by that.

Virginia Woolf's literature really transformed my own ideas about how to formally represent the passage of time and how time affects us. Specifically, the benchmarks are 'Mrs. Dalloway,' 'To the Lighthouse' and 'Orlando,' all of which have time as a central conceit.

A great sense of morality was instilled in me through my upbringing in the Catholic faith - particularly because my father is a moral theologian. And morality is something I believe exists separate from faith, as an intrinsic human quality that one should aspire to understand and participate in.

I find everything in life a little bit sad, but I also find a great deal of hope everywhere I look.

One of my earliest memories, movie-related or otherwise, is of seeing a man dunking a man's head in a toilet on television, and my mom telling me that this is what would happen to me if I ever joined the Army. It wasn't until my senior year in high school that I would discover that this was a scene from 'The Great Santini,' starring Robert Duvall.

I know I have trouble watching my own films.

There is a palpable sense of history in the homes that I choose to occupy. I think that's one of the reasons I gravitate towards old homes: I really like that sense of history and that sense that I am one step in a very long process that trails out in both directions around me - before me and ahead of me.

Digital is my safety net. I know how to use it, how to operate those cameras; it makes sense to me. Film is much more mysterious.

I love communicating non-verbally. I find great value in it.

We build our legacy piece by piece, and maybe the whole world will remember you or maybe just a couple of people, but you do what you can to make sure you're still around after you're gone.

It's something that you pick up at a history class in college, the idea that history and time is something to which we can't even hold a candle to. We, as human beings, are just a small element in the overarching sweep of narrative history. That really had a profound effect on me, that realization.

I love films that are more random and chaotic, finding moments and capturing them.

I like to make movies in Texas because that's where I learned how to do it. I know the industry there, I know the people, I know the crews. But it's hard to make films in Texas.

You always want your movies to reach the widest audience possible.