Sometimes you meet someone, and they seem great, they seem exactly what you're thinking of for the role, and then you put a camera on them, and they freeze. And other people come to life with the camera on them. I haven't discovered any reliable predictor for that; I think you just have to try it and see what happens. And, you know, sometimes the people who freeze, if you find the right magic word to say to them, you can unlock them.

I want the pleasures of the real exploitation movie, and exploitation has changed so much in 40 years. Plenty of people grow up with this fantasy of, "We're going to do it like Roger Corman did it," as that sounds so fun. If you make something small, goofy and exploitative, it's nowhere near the guaranteed moneymaker it might have been 40 years ago. If you look at the way the world works now and money is made, it doesn't seem that fun. Maybe that's just a mental block I have and I need to get over that and find that corner where you can make money and still have a good movie.

I think a lot of people go into filmmaking thinking, "How can I make a career?" And so when they make their first film, they make it thinking, "Well, this'll be the one that gets me to the place where I can make the second film the way I want to make it, and that'll get me to the place where I can make $100 million on the third film." And I thought, "Well, if I put sustainability at the bottom of my priority list, then what opportunities is that going to free me up to pursue?" And that's what I've always done.

Sometimes you meet someone, and they seem great, they seem exactly what you're thinking of for the role, and then you put a camera on them, and they freeze. And other people come to life with the camera on them. I haven't discovered any reliable predictor for that; I think you just have to try it and see what happens. And, you know, sometimes the people who freeze, if you find the right magic word to say to them, you can unlock them.

There are two aspects to making movies: One is the feeling of wanting to push myself into stuff that I don't know how to do. Then there's the other impulse to try and earn a living. I want to be careful about not confusing those too much - not that those things can't have a healthy overlap. Plenty of people start out making work that isn't terribly commercial, and then make work that's more commercial but still good. You just want to watch out for that thing where you tell yourself that you're doing your best work when you're not.

On one hand, I kind of feel like I have unlimited options right now, and obviously that's not technically true, but when you're at this place where you're just kind of dreaming up stuff, your imagination is your limit. That's where I'm at, which is great, but ultimately I think you have to make these decisions to close off some options to yourself. I think things only get done when you say, "This is the one thing I'm doing," and you kind of kill the other ones in the meantime. So I haven't done that yet, I've got to figure that out.

I've always spent a lot of time in movie theaters, kind of absorbing anything I can. I just love sitting in the dark, and watching the flickering image up there. Just sitting in a movie theater alone is inspiring to me. It takes a pretty bad movie to drain the magic out of that - but Lord knows, those movies exist.