I'm a fan of musicals from great masters, and I was able to have an opportunity to express myself in musical numbers with Glee.

I love visual stylists like Bob Fosse and Vincente Minnelli and Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger with The Red Shoes and The Tales of Hoffman.

On some kind of unspoken, deep, deep level, I think we [with Ryan Murphy] have an aesthetic that we both understand or connect to. It's not that we see the world in the same way because we have very different points of view, but we're both visual stylists.

At some point, you have an opportunity to not be a first-time filmmaker anymore. You can embrace the genre and show the world how you can tell stories on a bigger scale.

I just wanted to make movies, but I never though about, "How am I being perceived because of my culture or my skin?"

I still think that being thrown in a very competitive environment where you really have to see what you are made of - certainly when you come out of nowhere - was good for me.

Being exposed to the Ryan Murphy machine, it is very much a personal extension of him. So, if I can learn from that and tell longer stories that are quite personal, and balance that out with features, then that would be the ultimate dream.