“I think the ‘boys will be boys’ mantra is still alive and well in some corners of society. These hazing rituals still happen, so that expression, boys will be boys, it’s clearly a dangerous one.”

“I hope that people are both talking about the characters, thinking through what they saw and what was taking place off-screen, but then, beyond that, I want them to project their own selves into who these people are and how they’ve dealt with the choices they have made.”

“We know where Barack and Michelle are heading. We know what this spark is going to turn into. For me, that spark, that idea, it gave the story a richness that a fictionalized love story maybe couldn’t have had.”

“I think people will be very surprised by the film, about the genre they think that they know. There is so much depth and layering to the story yet at the same time it is completely entertaining. It doesn’t hit you over the head, message-wise, but at the same time you’ll get a taste of a lot of provocative thoughts and ideas; how we view the world and ourselves in it, how we treat one another in it. It’s all there and more.”

“For a specific group of people, maybe a bigger one than I let myself imagine it to be, [Don’t Think Twice] could be a film that gets watched multiple times, viewers finding things inside of it that I didn’t even know were there. How great would that be?”

“With Midnight Special, I had this idea of these two guys in the black car moving very fast through these rural back roads only it was night, and there was little to no light at all. I just started building it out from there.”

“[It’s] about having restraint. I can’t look into your soul. I don’t know what is the most scary to you so I have to hope that I can depict what is most personal and scary to me and then hold back and let the last bit be something that you fill in yourself. That’s the idea.”

“I like to explore relationships. I like to explore how we understand ourselves through these relationships.”

“I want [people] to realize that this is something different. I want them to be open to the experience of Anomalisa, that they connect with it, that they don’t limit themselves to the conventions of what animation or drama are supposed to be. That would be great.”