Zal Batmanglij

“On 'Sound of My Voice,' I was the first and last word, which is kind of a dictatorship. I like collectives, though.”

“I hate Q&As. They make me feel awkward.”

“I don't know if any specific religion is the one to subscribe to. I'm not saying, one way or the other. I don't want to get involved in that. But, I think having faith in this experience we are having as a group of people on Earth helps a lot.”

“It's funny how you never know who you're going to share your life with.”

“I think we're really hungry for family in America, especially when I feel like people are really pulled apart from their families.”

“I think we have to go through a lot of rituals in order to fill the gap of meaning in our lives.”

“When I call 'Action,' I love to be surprised. And the actors I've been fortunate enough to work with always surprise me in the best ways.”

“A good story isn't preachy; a good story is always entertaining.”

“We want to make a 100 million dollar movie that we have created, in the way James Cameron or Chris Nolan does. It's so inspiring when high-quality auteurs are writing and directing those movies. That's pretty cool.”

“Sci-fi always appealed to me, like, since I was a kid.”

“I think if aliens came to Earth, we would laugh. If there was an alien technology, we would laugh.”

“The country gets so beat up in the media. It's worth remembering how much we love America.”

“At AFI, you make three cycle films your first year, and then you make a thesis film your second year, and I watched Darren Aronofsky's cycle films and was blown away - there was a young Lucy Liu, who was just part of that generation. And I just wanted to be part of that tradition.”

“We lived on anarchist farms, squatted in the inner city, and hopped rail cars. We wanted to see how other young people were creating meaning from their lives.”

“It's not easy to learn to trust someone and let someone trust you.”

“You think it's so cool to have movie stars in your movie, but they become people.”

“It took us nine months to write 'The East'; we didn't start writing it on the computer until seven and a half months into it.”

“Actors love to do extreme things, so that is why they become actors; otherwise, they'd be novelists.”

“Marvel's storytelling is much wilder than 'The OA's,' but no one talks about that.”

“I think that all the powerful religions are pretty much the same. People like to pretend they are very different, but they are not. They are really about believing in something bigger than yourself, something that's unseen, and about having some faith.”