I'm sure there are directors who don't like to work with actors and don't know how to be sensitive to actors.

At age 12 I had an obsession with Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange and then proceeded to watch all the other Kubrick films I could including a doc called Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures in which it was revealed to me that he started as a photographer...I got a camera sometime shortly after, but spent many years just photographing flowers in my neighborhood.

I've been lucky to be able to work with great people and on interesting material.

Russia itself is an extremely complex country, and sometimes I feel like all of that comes back to haunt me. I can see why so many Russian writers were so tortured.

You don't share the things you're forced to share [on a movie set].

I need what I'm thinking to come out into the world, even if it's a two-word approval, like, "Yeah, I agree," I need that approval so that in the morning I can get up and use that when I go to work. It's a weird version of focusing.

If you want to make movies you need to think on a micro-micro level and figure out how to make them for nothing with people who really care about your movie and really want to make it.