JOHN LEE HANCOCK

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.

A good deed is a good deed.

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.

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.

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

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. Your job No. 1 is for it to be entertaining, and if it's inspiring, that is great, too.

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.

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

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.'

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.

We did not go to that many movies in a theater in the little town I grew up in.

I think that, anybody with a strong will to tell a story, then that is fantastic. I think it's fantastic. I think sometimes people have what I'll call an ulterior motive with a story.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

For every one that gets made, there are five other movies that you try to get made that you don't.

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

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

'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.

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.'