Writer

A good deed is a good deed.

I remember going to McDonald's for the first time probably when I was in college. And then I remember going and visiting a friend in Wyoming, and he said, 'We're going to do something special. We're going to McDonald's.'

I grew up in a refinery town in Texas, and we weren't fancy enough to have a McDonald's.

I've never read a script in which you are actively pulling for the protagonist in the beginning, but little by little, you lose that.

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

'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.

I didn't know the books and certainly didn't know the tragic origin story of Mary Poppins in 1906 Australia.

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

I think that all the anger and cynicism comes from suppressing things that we always wanted.

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.

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.

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

You set out to tell a good story. You don't do it because there is a deep message involved because the movie is almost always bad when you do that.

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.

It is so hard to get movies made in Hollywood that you got to have six going at once, and you know, probably none of those get made.

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.

Someone is going to win and someone is going to lose. That's also what happens in almost every movie - someone is going to win and someone is going to lose.

I got an English degree in college and then went to law school because I didn't know what else to do. I was a lawyer in Houston, Texas. I started writing plays and screenplays, and after about three years of practicing, I decided I would move to Los Angeles and give it a shot.

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