I'm the third generation of my family in the film business, and I grew up with a deep passion for movies. I made my own Super 8 films when I was a kid and always loved the editing process.

If you can depict situations and explore life in a truthful way and explore areas of grey - because that's where the truth lives - and you can do that in an objective way and allow people to take from that what they will, I think it's a satisfying sweet spot with storytelling.

I think I approached 'Captain Phillips' as I would any project. I always try to understand the story, characters, and themes as deeply as possible and then work as hard as I can to make those things come to life.

I've written under the radar for quite some time, and I always looked at editing as writing.

When you gather up all the balls of life that you try to juggle, it is a very difficult thing to try to focus in on taking good care of yourself. But that's why God invented me - so I can come and teach and preach and make people laugh and give them some education so they can start liking themselves better.

Herta Muller, Mo Yan, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio - for many of us, the Nobels have become doubly educational: We simultaneously learn of an author's existence and find out that we ought to have been reading him or her all along.

I have an education degree from the University of Minnesota, and I was a teacher for about a minute.

In the course of her education she had gone through the history usually put into the hands of young people... now her ripened reason gave to her present study at least the advantage of novelty.