What’s the point of getting up in the morning unless you’re gonna have an adventure? As the moments of our life are ticking away you have to be aware that it needs to be an adventure.

When all you’ve got is nothing, there’s a lot to go around.

If somebody tells you there’s a rule, break it.

If somebody tells you a rule, break it. That’s the only thing to move things forward.

Trust me, if you’re working on a $70 million movie and you’re the last guy, you feel all that weight on your shoulders.

The honest truth is that it was just traumatizing with the piano, with the authority of the piano teacher, getting rapped across the knuckles, and so whenever you put a piece of music in front of me, there’s a Pavlovian reaction where it starts off.

I’m a geek and I’m a nerd, and I can listen into any piece of music. I think, I can usually tell you what orchestra it was, I can usually tell you what hall it was in. I can tell you, obviously who the conductor was, and who the composer was.

America is a magical place, and I think my job, or the job of a lot of us European filmmakers is to just hold up America to Americans and present it to you in a new way. All I wanted to do is in a funny way say, “Look at your country. It’s magnificent.”

I’m homeless, in a funny way. My culture I think is completely rooted in German 19th century music I suppose.

The challenge in scoring a sequel is, how do you not get bored? The only way around that one is to go, “Okay, let’s throw everything out that we had before and let’s just see it as an autonomous movie, and let’s just start again.”