I do love the young adult novels as a form and genre, because it has a purity of intention and heart.

I try to keep feeling what's going on and try to use the camera, the actors and the design to enhance those feelings. There's something really emotionally direct and honest about how I put the material with the images. You hope that the strength of mise-en-scene comes from an honesty towards the material. You also hire really well.

For me, an actor is really, first and foremost, a person and an individual, more than they are an actor or a professional.

To come to change, there had to be conflict and pain.

I make films that are very personal, and I always have. It's kind of the only thing that I think I have to offer as a filmmaker: the intimacy I've had with experience in a particular world, so the film comes from things I've seen and things I've felt. It gets transformed by the process. I don't think I'd ever start making a film until I had both the intimacy with the subject and the distance to make it live in a certain way.

People, for reasons of kind of security, they tend to move towards people like themselves.

By 1988, I was living in New York myself.