John Lee Hancock

“If America had a motto, it would be pull yourself up by the bootstraps, work harder than the next guy, have a goal and achieve it.”

“We have the word 'Mc' attached to so many things now, like 'McMansions.' It's become part of our vernacular as something on steroids almost, just bigger and bigger. I think, to a degree, studios have fallen prey to that as well.”

“I really don't storyboard unless it's an action sequence of some kind, but I plan carefully.”

“You pick a project. You think, 'I can succeed at this. I can help them. I can make it so that they'll want to call me again the next time.'”

“Every director knows it is his job to be manipulative. When you make an edit, you are trying to manipulate.”

“Whenever a film has three different release dates, people understandably assume that there must be something wrong with it.”

“'Snow White and the Huntsman' was - I came in before they started shooting and basically worked on Charlize Theron's character for the most part. I guess I probably worked four or five weeks on that one and stayed during production a little bit with them.”

“I just hope, every now and then, the studios still slip one of my movies in.”

“Any time you have people of different races in a movie that's about America, there's going to be a racial component.”

“Every time you do a true story - and I've done a few - you have to look in the mirror and say, 'That's close enough. I'm comfortable with this.' You're always going to compress time; you're going to change the order of things. But I don't think you want to tell a big lie. You want to think that you're embracing the truth.”

“Somebody might say that they always wanted to be a fly-fishing guide in Montana and maybe they'll never get to do that but just by the virtue of having said it out loud, I think there's some power in that.”

“Christian audiences, I think, have grown very tired of movies that try to pander to them.”

“Every generation comes upon the movie again, and then, invariably, the books have a spike in sales because people want to read more about Mary Poppins.”

“Many years ago, I was a producer on a movie called 'My Dog Skip.' Willie Morris, the great southern writer, had written the book. We had adapted it and taken 17 years of his life and compressed it into one year.”

“I grew up in Texas City, Texas. I didn't know anybody who was a director or whose parents or grandparents were directors. I met somebody from a nearby town one time whose father had been to the moon - it was far more likely to be an astronaut than it was to be a writer or a director.”

“'The Blind Side' took forever to get it out of 20th Century Fox in turnaround. It was one of three different movies I was involved with then. 'The Blind Side' just happened to be the one that got made.”

“We felt a responsibility to the McDonald brothers and to Ray Kroc to be as factual as possible. We didn't have a responsibility to make anyone look good or anybody look bad, just to try our best to be honest.”

“Don't worry about the little factual details. Get to the heart of it.”

“I like some time away to recharge the batteries, not only physically but emotionally, so that I get to the point where I'm just dying to direct again, and then that's the right time to do it again.”

“When you are older, you want to be around people you admire, even in their personal lives.”