When I got inside, I just sort of stood there. There's nothing stranger than the smell of someone else's house. The scent goes right to your stomach. Mary's house smelled like lemon furniture polish and oatmeal cookies and logs in a fireplace. For some reason it made me want to curl up in the fetal position. I could have slept right there on their kitchen table.

I think, for me, when I direct my own work it's just an extension of the authorship.

Grief does not expire like a candle or the beacon on a lighthouse. It simply changes temperature. It becomes a kind of personal weather system. Snow settles in the liver. The bowels grow thick with humidity. Ice congeals in the stomach. Frost spiderwebs in the lungs. The heart fills with warm rain that turns to mist and evaporates through a colder artery.

I think auditioning can be very reductive and I just hate how actors work really hard and most of them aren't going to get the job, and I hate putting them through that.

What I've learned in the last few years is that I am merely a storyteller.

There must be some unwritten law that says about fifty people have to move into your house when somebody dies. If it weren't for the smell of death clinging to the walls, you might think it was your family's turn to host the month neighborhood potluck supper.

When it's just a few scenes and a couple of actors behaving in a room, I feel very confident with that.