How can [actors] learn their lines and be honest in front of 30 people and all the lights? It makes me cry sometimes. I can't understand how they can be joking with me 30 seconds before, and 40 seconds later they're giving me all this incredible feeling.

The way America sees Mexico, if they have any sense of it, is like Taco Bell. Our countries are neighbors, and the only hard food to get in America is true Mexican. It's impossible to find, even in L.A. Why is that?

I just wanted to show the migrants as complex humans with flaws and weakness, with good and bad things, and show that they're parents and family men. I wanted to show them with everything, as they are.

For me, it's not about masochism to talk about death. For me, it's about observing life through death, from the last point of it.

There's nothing better than being in a film that translates to audiences and makes people think and feel good and walk away with great revelations in their own life of some kind. But when the process and the experience and the fun of that matches, it's a good feeling.

I like to make films, but the only reason I do is because I'm a very bad musician.

All my films have always been released in the autumn, maybe because they're more melancholy to people.