I'd always liked movies in a kind of naive way. They seemed no less improbable a career than anything else.

It was in Austin that I had the idea for 'Days of Heaven.' I found myself alone for a summer in the town I had left as a high school student. There were those green, undulating hills, and this very beautiful river, the Colorado. The place is inspired and inspiring.

I have trouble working off things that are too preconceived, like storyboards.

There's a good many pictures I'd like to make; we'll see how many I'll be allowed to make.

My mother was a teacher, my father was a community organizer. I come from a working class background.

NASA was going to pick a public school teacher to go into space, observe and make a journal about the space flight, and I am a teacher who always dreamed of going up into space.

When I was first elected to the Colorado State Board of Education in 2000, we had to carry a big binder filled with hundreds of pages to every meeting. By 2004, the State Board had gone paperless. We even persuaded the less-tech-savvy members to use laptops to pull up their information during meetings.

Remember that just because major publishing is having trouble, that doesn't mean people have stopped reading books. Printed books won't go away, but ebooks won't go away, either.