Quotes from Ryan Fleck

Growing up where I did, I came from a politically progressive family so I was aware of social issues, but it seemed like a very separate thing from film.

Everything is a mess around our house. We do all our work here, but we try to get out once a day.

Hopefully 'Mississippi Grind' will be good in the theater.

So many great ideas come out of a misunderstanding.

Film has a magical process to it. The dailies, and the thing you see on your little film monitor, that's not the same thing that's going to be projected.

I'm a sucker for movies about uncommon friendships: 'Midnight Cowboy,' 'Harold and Maude,' 'Scarecrow,' 'The Last Detail,' 'Y Tu Mama Tambien,' 'Jules and Jim,' 'Rushmore,' 'Stand by Me.'

I moved to New York City in 1997 as an undergraduate transfer student at NYU.

For us, the biggest thing is casting and making sure that every role has the right fit and that person understands the role, and then, really, it's pretty easy. You just try to stay out of the way and say 'action' and 'cut' - don't say 'cut' too soon. Let it happen.

We won't look at New Orleans, St. Louis or Memphis again without thinking about making 'Mississippi Grind.' We have a lot of memories.

It was cool to meet Stan Lee.

We had no interest in making a traditional sports movie.

Well, when you're nitpicking every little detail... with digital, you're seeing what the finished product is, right there on set, and that's when you start to lose a lot of time. You lose time staring at that image trying to make it perfect.

I'm very excited by the notion of very different people trying to help each other out.

Nowadays when you're shooting HD people will walk in front of the camera, it can just be rolling all the time - nobody cares.

I was born in Berkeley, California, in 1976, and grew up in and around Oakland and the Bay Area.

We wanted to capture Danvers' humor and flaws. For us as storytellers, those are all aspects that we really appreciate in characters.

I think on our first two movies we weren't really writing for anybody else above us and that's not to say that movies aren't ours in the way we want them to be in terms of the scripts.

The original outline for 'Mississippi Grind' was actually an attempt to go funny. But when we showed it to people we realized that maybe it wasn't as funny to other people as it was to us - we have a pretty specific sense of what's funny - and then we thought, O.K., we need to do this more like we would actually make one of our movies.

I grew up in Oakland and for a long time I was the only white kid in school. Then I moved to the suburbs when I was in junior high and it was mostly white.

Anytime you actually finish a film, I think it's a success. And to have that film seen and liked by audiences is the ultimate.

We hate it when movies, right off the bat, tell you who this character is, where they're from, why they are the way they are. Even 'Vertigo,' one of the greatest movies ever made, starts off by explaining why Jimmy Stewart has this fear of heights.

You have to follow the logic of your characters while you're writing.

I believe Ryan Reynolds is magic. He's a magical human being.