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.

What will always be possible is for someone to walk into a dark room and experience a film and connect to it. And that's why I make my films - for people to go and have that experience. That's really the whole dream for me, so that hasn't gone anywhere. What has gone somewhere is making the numbers add up on each side of it. And who knows? I've had all kinds of freak-outs. I got married recently, and my wife listened to me go off the other day on this fear that maybe our culture has just moved beyond art entirely. Maybe we don't need it anymore.

I guess I'm not always looking for the same things in movies that most people are, which I wouldn't have necessarily even really known if not for spending too much time reading about myself on the Internet.

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.

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 don't want to take shots at professional actors, because obviously the great ones are great. But I do think that given the kind of stories I've been telling in my films, it's hard for me to imagine how professional actors would have done better. And it's easy for me to imagine how they would have done worse. Because I think a lot of what an actor is trained to do and a lot of what an actor's instincts point toward is clarification, is always making it clear what's happening in the story, how the character fits into the scene, what the character wants.

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.